Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St LukeBurton, Henry
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St Luke
Burton, Henry
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
And so we see how, in ways simple and purely natural, Scripture grows.
St. Luke was not conscious of any special influence resting upon him. He
did not pose as an oracle or as the mouthpiece of an oracle, though he
was all that, and vastly more. He does not even know that he is doing
any great work; and who ever does? A generous, unselfish thought takes
possession of him. He will sacrifice leisure and ease, that he may throw
forward to others the light that has fallen upon his own heart and life.
He will be a truth-seeker, and a light-bearer for others. Here, then,
we see how a human mind falls into gear with the Divine mind, and human
thought gets into the rhythm and swing of the higher thought. Simply
natural, purely human are all his processes of reasoning, comparing, and
planning, and the whole Gospel is but the perfect bloom of this
seed-thought. But whence came this thought? That is the question. Did it
not grow out of these manifold narratives? and did not the narratives
themselves grow out of the wonderful Life, the Life which was itself but
a Divine Thought and Word incarnate? And so we cannot separate heaven
from earth, we cannot eliminate the Divine from even our little lives;
and though St. Luke did not recognize it as such--he was an ordinary
man, doing an ordinary thing--yet we, standing a few centuries back, and
seeing how the Church has hidden in her ark the omer of manna that he
gathered, to be carried on and down till time itself shall be no more,
we see another Apocalyptic vision, and we hear a Voice Divine that
commands him "write." When St. Luke wrote, "It seemed good to me also,"
he doubtless wrote the pronoun small; for it was the "me" of his
obscure, retiring self; but high above the human thought we see the
Divine purpose, and as we watch, the smaller "me" grows into the ME,
which is a shadow of the great I AM. And so while the "many" treatises,
those which were purely human, have passed out of sight, buried deep in
their unknown sepulchres, this Gospel has survived and become
immortal--immortal because God was behind it, and God was in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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