Saint Luke

But before he was a gifted writer, Luke is remembered as a rare and faithful companion. His name appears quietly beside Saint Paul’s: working with him, weathering storms at sea with him, and above all staying with him through the loneliest days of his imprisonment in old age, when almost everyone else had gone.

Luke was not one of the original Twelve Apostles. In the opening lines of the third Gospel, he shows a rare honesty, surprisingly humble for an author: he admits that he was not an eyewitness of everything from the beginning, but that he carefully investigated every detail from the first witnesses, then set it down in an orderly way to give to a dear friend named Theophilus.

That honesty is precious. Coming later did not stop him from serving the truth fully. Luke did not need to claim he had known everything from the start; he served the Church with ears that listened carefully, a mind that checked every detail, and a pen faithful to the truth, even when the truth was neither pretty nor comfortable.

The group reached Philippi and met some women praying by a river outside the city gate, since there were not yet ten Jewish men there to form a synagogue. Among them was Lydia, a wealthy dealer in purple cloth, who opened her home wide to welcome them all. After that the “we” disappears for a while (perhaps Luke stayed in Philippi to care for the young community while Paul traveled on) and then reappears years later, as the group made its way from Macedonia toward Jerusalem. Luke records the windswept harbors, the tears at each farewell and the warm welcomes along the way as someone who shared every weary step, not as an outside observer.

As a physician, Luke must often have used his skill to care for the group on those hard journeys: binding wounds after floggings, treating someone with a fever on the road, or simply seeing when a fellow traveler was too exhausted to go on. His Gospel bears the mark of a trained eye: he records the high fever of Peter’s mother-in-law and the Lord’s sweat like drops of blood in the Garden of Olives, details a doctor would readily notice and record.

All hope of survival seemed gone. In the middle of that panic it was Paul, the prisoner, not the captain, who stood up and reassured everyone, telling them to take heart because God had promised to spare all their lives. The ship finally broke apart near Malta, but all two hundred and seventy-six people on board swam safely to shore, where the islanders, complete strangers, welcomed them with great kindness and lit fires to warm them, soaked and shivering as they were.

Luke shared fully in that fear, that bitter cold and that brush with death; he was not standing aside taking notes. The physician who wrote of God’s mercy now learned for himself what it is to have nothing and to be warmed by strangers after escaping death by a hair’s breadth.

Many stories Vietnamese Catholics love dearly are found only in Luke: the Annunciation to Our Lady, the Visitation to Saint Elizabeth, the Magnificat sung by a young girl, the poor shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night and hurrying to the manger at Bethlehem, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the merciful father welcoming home his prodigal son, the short tax collector Zacchaeus scrambling up a sycamore tree just to see the Lord, and the two downcast disciples on the road home to Emmaus.

Luke has a special, almost partial love for the poor, for women, for those pushed to the margins. He pays close attention to Jesus’ quiet life of prayer and to the silent, powerful work of the Holy Spirit throughout the story. He writes the early history of the Church with rare honesty, not hiding the quarrels or the complaints about how food was shared among the widows, to show that God’s grace patiently shapes and leads fragile, imperfect people rather than demanding a perfect community from the start.

The Church celebrates Saint Luke the Evangelist on October 18 each year. Doctors and health workers find in him the image of a kind-hearted physician; writers and journalists find in him an example of using the pen to serve truth and faith, not to embellish or distort them.