This encounter might seem intolerable if it concerned anyone other than Jesus. If we imagine Mary as the household member who after dinner is far too absorbed in her guests’ fascinating conversation to bother about clearing the table but leaves all that sort of thing to her drudge of a sister, we may find ourselves solidly on Martha’s side of the argument. Rather, we should read this anecdote in the context of Jesus’s (and presumably Mary’s) understanding that his time is short, that his entire life is lived against the horizon of apocalypse. Mary is one of the wedding guests who rejoice while the bridegroom is among them, refusing to deprive themselves of the joy of his presence for the sake of some lesser goal. Whatever Martha is huffing and puffing about can be put off till Jesus moves on.
For Luke, Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good Samaritan, whose actions are Christ-like. Only if we put Christ before all practical considerations—only if we clear a place for him in our hearts (rather than clear the table)—will we be able to behave as the Samaritan does. For us who (like Luke and his gentile readers) live in the time after Jesus, without the comfort of his physical presence, clearing a place for Jesus means praying. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus, despite the constant outpouring of his energy in preaching and healing, always finds time to “withdraw to some lonely place to pray.” So, immediately after the story of Martha and Mary, Jesus teaches his disciples to pray:
ROMAN PALESTINE IN THE TIME OF JESUS
For the sake of effective administrative control, the Romans divided the ancient territory of the Jews in different ways at different times. At the time of Jesus’s death, Judea-Samaria-Idumea was subject to Pontius Pilate, and Galilee to the north and Perea on the west bank of the Jordan were subject to Herod Antipas. The populations of these territories were quite mixed, Judea-Samaria-Idumea containing, as the names imply, Jews, Samaritans, and Idumeans, as well as Greeks, Romans, and other Eurasians. Rural Galilee was home to Samaritans as well as Jews. The Decapolis was largely composed of Roman settlers.
“When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone who wrongs us.
And do not put us to the test.”
Luke is not later than Mark and Matthew in every respect. Here he has recorded what is almost certainly the original form of the New Testament’s most famous prayer. (Matthew’s alterations and psalm-like parallelisms do little more than elaborate what is implicit in the original: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not put us to the test, but deliver us from the Evil One.”)4
Luke is building up a purposeful sequence, which begins by answering the question “Who is my neighbor?” and goes on to remind the reader that unfailing kindness (even to strangers) is possible only if we keep Jesus in mind—that is, if we pattern our lives on his—and that such a resolve can be accomplished only if we pray as Jesus did, asking Jesus’s loving Father (who is also our Father) to watch over us. What we say to the Father is not so important; and despite the fact that Jesus’s sample prayer has become an unvarying Christian incantation, he meant only to sketch one possibility, not to lock us into a formula.
In the last story of this Lucan sequence, Jesus gives us a midrash on his own prayer:
“Suppose one of you has a friend, who comes [to your house] at midnight and calls out, ‘My friend, lend me three loaves of bread, since a friend of mine on a journey has just arrived and I have nothing to offer him.’ And suppose the man inside replies, ‘Leave me alone! The door is already bolted, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything now.’ I tell you, even if he will not get up and give it to him out of friendship, shameless persistence will make him get up and give the other whatever he needs.
“So I tell you: Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and the door shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; everyone who searches, finds; and to everyone who knocks the door shall be opened. What father among you, if your son asked for a fish, would hand him a snake, or, if he asked for an egg, would hand him a scorpion? If, then, you who are evil know how to give your children what is good, how much more surely will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
There is a roughness to this parable—a man in a one-room house, closed up for the night, his whole family in the one bed; gruff fathers, showing their love for their children in acts of silent, seemingly begrudging, generosity—that easily convinces us of its Palestinian origin. Luke, the Greek biographer, has done his homework, however unpleasant it may have been, however persistent he had to be. But Jesus’s understanding of the God we pray to is pellucid: if you are a good, though reluctant, neighbor, God is much more generous than you; if you are a good, though undemonstrative, father, God is a more loving father than you could even imagine being. Therefore, ask boldly and without fear.
LUKE SEES CHRISTIAN LIFE as an alternation of two activities, prayer and kindness, each feeding the other. The plight of those in need sends me to prayer; prayer strengthens me to help those in need.5 But for Luke there is one thing that can make a Christ-like life impossible. For Jewish Matthew, who was so sensitive to the haughty high-mindedness of the Pharisees, that one thing was religious hypocrisy. For Luke, at one remove from the conflicts of Jewish life and looking squarely at the far more insidious temptations of Greco-Roman society, the one thing that can make a Christ-like life impossible is wealth. Carefully pruning the many-branched tradition he has received, Luke presents us with teachings of Jesus that especially stress the evil obstacle of riches:
“Once there was a rich man whose lands produced abundant crops. The man thought to himself, ‘What a delightful problem! My yield is now larger than my storage space. I know what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build even bigger ones. After that, I will gather all my grain into them and all my other goods, as well. Then will I say to my soul, Dear soul, you have so many good things stored up for years to come. Do take it easy now; eat, drink, and be merry.’
“But God said to him, ‘Fool, this very night is your soul demanded of you. Then what will it matter who gets all this?’ ”
To this ominous parable, Luke adds his own ominous words: “This is how it will go with anyone who piles up treasure for himself but is not rich before God.” And as if this parable were not enough, Luke gives us another that follows a similar rich man beyond the grave, where we find out what happens to those who die without being “rich before God”:
“Once there was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously every day. At his gate lay a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to be fed if only with the scraps that dropped from the rich man’s table. [He was so lowly that] even the dogs would come by and lick his sores.
“One day the beggar died and was carried by the angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. But in Hades the rich man was tormented. Once he looked up and saw Abraham far off with Lazarus beside him. ‘Father Abraham,’ he cried, ‘have mercy on me! Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water that he might cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.’
“Abraham replied, ‘Remember, my child, that you received only good things during your life, but Lazarus only evils. Now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed so that those who might want to cross over from this side to you cannot; nor can any come over from there to us.’
“Still did he plead, ‘Then I beg you, Father, at least send him to my father’s house, where I have five brothers, that he might warn them, lest
they too end up in this place of torment.’
“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them listen to them.’
“ ‘No, Father Abraham,’ said he, ‘they will not listen. But if someone were to come back from the dead to them, they would open their hearts.’ Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.’ ”
We cannot know if Jesus’s original parable ended with this glancing reference to his own resurrection; but Luke certainly intends the Christian reader to catch it and therefore to reflect that even something as spectacularly singular as the revelation contained in the Torah and the Prophets or the resurrection of Jesus will not impress those who are determined to pursue only their own aggrandizement. And though Luke’s many negative references to wealth make it clear that he saw personal riches as the preeminent blindfold to spiritual sight, he is not as far from Matthew’s concerns as this might seem to imply. Both wealth and religious hypocrisy blind a man to his true responsibilities. The rich men of the Lucan parables can see only their wealth, which blinds them to the needs of others that they should be so able to minister to. The Pharisees of Matthew “shut up the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces” and found their own justification on hairsplitting legalistic distinctions but “neglect the weightier matters of the Law—justice, mercy, good faith!” They “lay on people heavy [religious] burdens but will not lift a finger” to help them with those burdens. Their sanctimony in the service of their own self-aggrandizement is as blinding to them as the rich man’s wealth is to him. So hoarded wealth and the arrogant complacency of churchmen—both of them forms of uncaring power—are just two of the traps that can keep human beings from seeing the true nature of their situation. For, says Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, “The very things most valued by human beings are abominations in the eyes of God.”
Wealth and religious hypocrisy may seem rather rarefied temptations, available only to the privileged few. But Jesus was aware that, for ordinary mortals, grinding worry could easily take the place of arrogance and greed. Jesus, always far more sympathetic to ordinary people than he ever is to the privileged, is far gentler in dealing with the stumbling block of worry, even though he sees it as an obstacle to a full life:
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, nor your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more are you worth than birds! Which of you can by worrying add a single hour to his life? If you cannot do so small a thing, why worry about the rest?
“Consider how the lilies grow. They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow cast into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith? And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; don’t even worry about it. For the pagans run after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Seek, rather, his Kingdom, and all these things will be added unto you.
This is Luke’s redaction of the teaching, better known in its Matthean version. Both evangelists took it from Q—in whatever version of that surmised document each was using, which may account for the slight variations between them. Matthew’s “birds of the air” become Luke’s “ravens”; his “lilies of the field” become the more prosaic “lilies”; and his “Seek, rather, his Kingdom and God’s Justice” loses its final phrase in Luke’s version. But if the substantial similarity is proof of the care of both evangelists in an age in which research libraries and reference tools were virtually unknown, Luke’s special material—all the parables (the Good Samaritan, the sleepy Palestinian householder, the stories of the rich men) and incidents (Jesus reading from the Isaiah scroll, Jesus with his friends Martha and Mary) that appear only in Luke—is proof of Luke’s unremitting industriousness and his dogged resolve to compose a life of Jesus that, though as accurate as he could make it, was to be pitched specifically to gentiles.
There are in Luke’s choices traces of the reticence that we find in the classical Greek dramatists, who kept violent and lascivious episodes off their stage. In relating the imprisonment and execution of John the Baptizer, which Luke has taken from Mark’s earthy account, he carefully omits any mention of Salome dancing provocatively before her stepfather, Herod, reflecting, as Raymond Brown remarks, Luke’s “distaste for the sensational.” Similarly, when Jesus cleanses the Temple of those who, treating it as a bazaar, have set up businesses there, in Luke’s version he merely “drives them out,” whereas in Mark and Matthew he overturns tables and stalls and in John goes on to scatter coins and whip the vile shopkeepers into the street.
There is even in Luke a saying of Jesus that presents him very nearly as a typical pagan wise man, cautioning his followers on their manners at a banquet. Do not, advises Jesus, elbow your way to the best seat. “A more distinguished person than you may have been invited,” and the host may have to ask you to move, much to your embarrassment. Better to take the most humble seat, “so that, when your host comes in, he may say, ‘My friend, move up higher.’ Then, everyone with you at the table will see you honored.” Good advice, no doubt, for the upwardly mobile, but not much to do with the Gospel—and saved only by Jesus’s final comment: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
The “wisdom” of such a discourse would fit smoothly into any of the many ancient how- to books on good manners and laudable conduct, but its ring is not especially Jewish or Christian. In this passage, Luke, building perhaps on an authentic saying of Jesus about the last being first and the first last, may have added as illustration an exchange on table manners that does little more than exhibit his own social prejudices. These small indications of Luke’s Greco-Roman predispositions have prompted some critics to the extreme assertion that Luke is a Stoic in Christian clothing or even that Luke’s Jesus is a species of Stoic philosopher. Without championing such a notion, which would do violence to Luke’s obvious overall intent, we may say that it would indeed be odd if Luke had no identity other than that of a God-fearer who had committed himself to the Jesus Movement. He had a family, an education, and a cultural background that would, whatever the strength of his adult commitment, leave some traces in his writings—and we should not be surprised to find such.
The Stoics were in favor of moderation and opposed to the indulgence of the Epicureans (the original “eat, drink, and be merry” crowd), but not one of them would have signed on to Luke’s opinion of riches. Seneca, for instance, certainly the most prominent Stoic of his (and Luke’s) time, was widely admired for being one of the wealthiest men in Rome. Luke’s “holy poverty”—long before its Franciscan articulation—would only have appalled the Stoics, who would have found someone like John D. Rockefeller much more to their taste, a man famous for his temperance who also had the keenest appreciation of the holy importance of wealth. There was nothing otherworldly about the Stoics.
Luke’s poverty of spirit went far indeed. He seems to have been, if anything, more radical than Jesus on this point. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells Peter and the other disciples, “In truth I tell you, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, or land for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times as much.” When Luke recounts the same episode, his list of those to be left behind is telling: “house, wife, brothers, parents, or children.” “Sisters” can be understood in the Greek “brothers,” and “mother, father” has been collapsed into “parents.” “Land” is gone, perhaps collapsed into “house”—or is it the sort of possession an urban evangelist would think too marginal to mention? “Children” in both quotations should be understood as referring only to adult children. But the startling Lucan addition is “wife.?
?? It is impossible to imagine Jesus, who made so much of equality and mutual faithfulness in marriage, asking his disciples to give up their wives—or their husbands, since there were certainly married female disciples. And in fact we know from an incidental remark of Paul in First Corinthians that “the other apostles, the brothers [and sisters?] of the Lord, and the Rock” himself all had spouses who accompanied them on their missionary journeys in the 50s and 60s.
In Luke’s Gospel we are already a half century away from Jesus and decades away from the apostolic missions; and here we discover this gentile disciple, trying to hew as closely as possible to Jesus’s intent but somewhat revising his teaching in an age of such difficulties for Christians that the combination of marriage and firm commitment to the Gospel, even to the point of martyrdom, may have seemed impossible. Beneath Luke’s gentle surface is an uncompromising, all-or-nothing attitude, giving credibility to the second sentence of the identity ascribed to him in antiquity and attached to his gospel: “He served the Lord without distraction, without a wife, and without children.”
I THINK WE MUST see Luke as an educated man of the first century whose critical assessment of the gross materialism of his own society and whose profound attraction to truth, first nourished perhaps by pagan philosophy, led him to the one God of the Jews and the compelling power of the Septuagint. Luke gives us an excellent imitation of the peculiar Greek of this translation of the Hebrew scriptures in the opening chapters of his gospel, in which the parents of John the Baptizer and of Jesus and the ancient devotees of the Temple cluster around the births of Jesus and his precursor, singing their exceedingly Jewish psalms and canticles. The Temple priest Zechariah in his vision, his wife Elizabeth in her insight, Mary in her Magnificat, Joseph in his obedience, Simeon in his ecstasy, and Anna in her prophecy are all meant, in the archaic Greek of their utterings, to remind us of Old Testament figures, the last figures of the old dispensation, singing in the Messiah.