An image of St Luke in the C6th Augustine Gospels,
held in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
An address given at Templederry Church on Saturday 18th October 2025, the Feast Day of Luke the Evangelist, and at St Mary's Nenagh the following Sunday 19th October 2025
Today we are
celebrating the feast of St Luke the Evangelist.
‘Evangelist’ is the title the church gives to the four Gospel writers, of which Luke is one of course.
When I first sat down to write this sermon, I decided to explore who this man Luke was, and who he wasn’t. I looked up scholarly resources, and many less reliable resources, such as Google. And I began to write a sermon filled with references and quotes. I realised I was just showing off my own less than scholarly erudition. Those of you in this family service who are older would have found it dry as dust, and those who are younger, dull as ditch water.
So I started again,
trying to paint a vivid picture of Luke as a vibrant and interesting person,
who lived a truly exciting life in the service of his God, of Jesus who rose
from the dead, and of the rapidly developing and growing fellowship of
believers of which he was a part.
So here goes…
Luke grew up in a
Greek-speaking family, probably in the city of Antioch in ancient Syria.
Antioch was a big and important city, the capital of the Roman province of Syria, which grew rich on the spice trade with the East. Before then it had been the capital of the Seleucid Empire, founded by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, for some 300 years.
Antioch must have been an exciting place to grow up in. As a Greek-speaking capital city, it was full of arenas and theatres, schools and libraries. And it was a multi-cultural melting pot, the streets filled with visiting traders in foreign clothes, speaking strange languages. A bit like London, or New York today, perhaps.
In Luke’s time, Antioch was a centre for Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora. We do not know for sure whether he was a Jew or a gentile, but we do know Luke was highly educated. No doubt he attended one of the many schools, where he learned to write excellent Greek, better than the other Gospel writers. His books show he was familiar with Greek literary texts. We also believe he studied to be a medical doctor, because St Paul calls him ‘Luke, the beloved physician’.
Luke wrote two
books of our New Testament, his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.
We know this because the language used in both, and the underlying theology, are so similar that they must have come from the same hand. Both are addressed to the same person, perhaps his patron, Theophilus, meaning lover of God. And all the early church writers agree Luke wrote both.
These books are works of history, in the style of the time, and Luke was no mean historian. There is little reason to believe he was ever an eyewitness to Jesus’s life. But in his Gospel he carefully collected and set down the story of Jesus’s life, drawing on different sources, including the earlier Gospel of Mark, a lost collection of the sayings of Jesus shared with the Gospel of Matthew, and some other eyewitness accounts unique to himself.
The Acts of the Apostles traces the story of how the primitive church grew and developed after Jesus’s resurrection up to the time of Paul’s imprisonment in Rome. The first part deals with the life of the church in Jerusalem, and the second part with St Paul’s ministry journeys. It reads like an exciting, adventure story, as the new church rapidly spreads, starting from a small group of frightened disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem, right across the Roman empire, to Rome itself. Do take down your bible at home and read it from start to finish to experience that excitement.
In Acts, Luke draws on many sources of evidence for his story, but for some of it, Luke himself is clearly an eyewitness.
Luke travelled with
St Paul on some of his missionary journeys.
We know this because some of the later parts of Acts are written in the 3rd person plural as ‘We’. For instance, Luke writes, ‘After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia’, and ‘We put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace’.
So it is not surprising, that Paul refers to Luke by name in some of his epistles. In Philemon (1:24), Paul describes Luke as ‘a fellow worker’. In 2 Timothy (4:11), as we heard in today’s 1st reading, Paul, awaiting death in prison in Rome, says, ‘Only Luke is with me’. In Colossians (4:14), Paul speaks of ‘Luke, the beloved physician’.
Here a word of caution is due - many modern scholars believe 2 Timothy and Colossians were not written by Paul himself, though Philemon is universally recognised as Paul’s.
Today’s 2nd
reading, from Luke’s Gospel, tells the story of 70 disciples Jesus sent ahead
of him in pairs to prepare his way in places he planned to visit.
It is the pious belief of the Eastern Orthodox Church that Luke was one of these 70 disciples, all of whom they name. They celebrate Luke not just as an Evangelist, but also as an Apostle of the Seventy.
Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus in the late 4th century, is the first recorded to say he was. I am doubtful. If Luke really was one of the 70, why does he not signal his presence, as he does in the Acts of the Apostles? But the fact is, we really don’t know one way or the other. We should be slow to criticise the pious beliefs of other brothers and sisters in Christ.
We know little else
for sure about Luke’s life.
A much later 8th century tradition maintains that Luke was the first person to paint icons. This is doubtful, but Luke is widely recognised as the patron saint of artists. He is said to have painted a picture of the Virgin Mary and child, known as the Madonna of Constantinople. Although it is now lost, many copies exist and are venerated by the Orthodox churches. The art critic A I Uspensky says that other icons attributed to Luke himself display a Byzantine style not seen before the 5-6th centuries, so could not have been painted by him.
What did Luke do after his time in Rome with St Paul? We know nothing at all about it.
However, a later tradition says that he died aged 84 in Boeotia in Greece, crucified by pagans on an olive tree. We may make of that what we will.
What an exciting
life Luke had!
He played a prominent role in the rapidly growing Jesus movement, the primitive church spreading like wildfire across the Roman Empire. We do well to celebrate him on his feast day!
I finish in prayer
with a Collect from the Episcopal Church.
Almighty God, who inspired your servant Luke the physician
to set forth in his Gospel the love and healing power of your Son:
Graciously continue in your Church this love and power to heal,
to the praise and glory of your Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you,in the unity of the Holy Spirit,one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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