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Today we celebrate our parish’s Feast Day, the feast of the one whose name our church bears: St. Luke the Evangelist, one of the four writers of the Gospels handed down to us as well as the Acts of the Apostles.
There’s a lot we don’t know about Luke, the writer of the Gospel that bears his name. According to tradition, Luke was a physician. In our Scripture readings today, we learn that one of Paul’s helpers on the way was named Luke. At the end of the day, there’s just very little we actually know about Luke the Evangelist.
What we do know is that Luke wanted to put Jesus’ ministry in context of the Gentile world around him, one that his first reader, Theophilus, would have been familiar with. Luke tries to lay out who Jesus was as a real person in history. He’s trying to lead us into understanding who Jesus is, as we see in Jesus’ reading from the Scroll of Isaiah today.
Luke is an Evangelist, meaning messenger, not only in his title as a writer of a Gospel, but also in what he was trying to do. He was trying to spread the Good News to all that might read his work. He was trying to bring others closer to Jesus. He was trying to share the Word so that others might become followers of the Way, as he lays out in Acts, the great Body of Christ, the church as we have come to call it.
For this reason, I’d like to think Luke would feel touched and honored that on his feast day, we bring a new person into that Body of Christ. We do so at a young age so that this child might always know the very person Luke wrote about in his works: Christ Jesus.
Now Jesus, in His day and age, didn’t get a lot of support in his home town. Shortly after this passage today, the people of Nazareth chase Jesus to the end of town, almost off the edge of a cliff. Lo be it unto us if we do the same.
No, we are called instead, through our own Baptismal Covenant, to make sure this child and his family have all the support they need so that he might never go a day when he doesn’t know our Lord Jesus Christ in his life.
In this way we honor our Lord and do His Will. At the same time, we also follow in the footsteps of St. Luke and live up to his name as a parish. Like our patron, be evangelists, messengers of God, in this world. Help this child, and others, come to know Jesus, just like Luke did with his own life.