Luke Chapter One; John and Jesus
Luke starts his Gospel in the way ancient historians did, setting out his purpose and method; he is going to gather together stories, specifically first hand, and eye witness accounts of Jesus, of which Luke claims to have a perfect understanding. Quite a big claim, you might think and especially as the first story he recounts, the story of Zacharias and Elizabeth must have happened some sixty to seventy years earlier and whiff of myth about it. The more interesting question is not authenticity but, why Luke starts his history of Jesus with the story of John the Baptist’s nativity. All the Gospel writers tell us something about John and always he is one of the first to recognise Jesus’ divinity, but Luke goes further back to tell about John’s own miraculous origins.
There are, I suspect, two reasons for this. The first is that Luke is particularly keen to put the Gospel in a scriptural context. In particular, in these first pages, Luke portrays John and Jesus as new versions, final examples of Old Testament heroes and prophets. At the start of the Gospel, we need to understand that Jesus, and John emerge from a scriptural background, and that entails miraculous conceptions in the tradition of the patriarchs, judges and prophets, and specifically Samuel, whose mother Hannah’s song provides the template for the Magnificat.
In these miraculous conceptions, Luke points to the similarities between Jesus and John, but I think his second purpose is to distinguish the two men. I don’t have any extraneous evidence to support it, but my feeling is that Jesus and John were to some extent rivals in their lives and in the movements which spread following their deaths. First century Judaism was proselytising religion, and the missions of the apostles and Paul would have been a familiar phenomenon. Paul is surprised to discover in Ephesus that the converts knew only the baptism of John. Plainly John’s disciples had been on missions rather similar to Christian mission of Paul and others, but got to Ephesus first. Underneath the mutual respect, we can perhaps read some suspicion and rivalry in the gospel accounts of relations between the two parties, during their lifetimes. The evangelists harness this tension to emphasise the importance of John, but equally his subsidiary role. He is the last prophet, the first to recognise Jesus for who he is.
The nativity stories draw out other distinctions as well as similarities. Although they are kinswomen, we are told Elizabeth is a daughter of Aaron that is, of priestly descent (and obviously Zacharias is too). Joseph however, is a descendant of David. John’s pedigree, traced though his mother, follows the conventional Jewish rule. Jesus’ pedigree is more complicated and decidedly unconventional. The story is that Joseph was not Jesus biological father but it wouldn’t have helped if he had been, as it should be Mary’s line that mattered. That is perhaps why a further story was needed to provide her with an alternative and magical pedigree in Joachim and Anna. It would be dangerous to read too much into this contrast, but there may be suggestion that while John follows the priestly and Levitical tradition, based in ritual and strict observance, Jesus is closer to the deuteronomic thread in Old Testament thinking, more concerned with purposive interpretation of the Law, with principle rather that strict practice and integrity rather than ritual. Jesus’ ancestor David, was certainly no great respecter of the sacred.
This is perhaps also the point of Gabriel’s predictions concerning John’s life; later on we will hear about his sartorial and dietary idiosyncrasies; here we are told about his abstinence from strong drink. Jesus, thankfully, was no stranger to the bottle, and shockingly ready to dine with publicans and sinners. More generally, as Gabriel predicts, John’s conversion technique will be uncompromising, and his message threatening. Jesus is rather more sympathetic and mild.
My final contrast is between Zacharias’ hesitation, indeed scepticism, and Mary’s ready acceptance of Gabriel’s message. Zacharias needs to be tested, although he emerges later with flying colours as he predicts John’s role as precursor and prophet in the Benedictus. Any hesitation or doubt is cleared away in his own prophecy of tradition fulfilled and covenant performed. This follows hard on Mary’s rather more revolutionary outburst in the Magnificat. Her son’s message will be equally radical.
I have concentrated on the contrasts between John and Jesus which we can see in the start of Luke’s Gospel, but this is, of course, only one facet of a much more fundamental theme; how to reconcile the Old and New Testaments, or the extent to which and way in which the Gospel was good news that is something fresh and different or just a new way of telling the old story. In other words, was Christianity more than a Jewish revival? As this question was debated, and as the stories which Luke would shape into his Gospel were being told, the young Christian church was struggling to reconcile its Jewish heritage with the missionary advance and the increasing presence of Christians who had no direct experience of Judaism or the Old Testament. Nor, after 70 AD did the temple with its ritualistic worship exist. It was a time of struggle within the church, and hostile pressure from without, not least from the Jewish establishment, which no doubt explains Luke’s hostility to the Jews, but equally his clinging to the those traditions as we have seen in is first chapter.
Luke’s attempt to reconcile the novelty and tradition of Christianity, is epitomised in his treatment of John and Jesus. John and his stern, traditional and uncompromising view of the world are respected, indeed they are necessary as an endorsement of the radical and new gospel. The scriptures and all they entail, are not to be abandoned but to be fulfilled. Jesus will show what they really mean.
Elizabeth is barren and anyway too old to conceive; Mary is a young virgin. Through God’s intervention, both have babies. The Old Testament may seem at times locked in its own themes, grand though they are, but a new direction is needed to bring them to fruition. God can make them fertile, but to bring them to harvest something new and different is needed; like his baptism, John’s conservatism lacked spirit, despite Gabriel’s predictions, and his conversions are induced by fear and threats rather than optimism and grace. Six months behind John, something young and surprising is growing in Mary’s womb. He will inaugurate a new order which will indeed be fired by the spirit of God, not to destroy the old order but to bring it to completion, in ways it had not recognised. Amen