Today the church remembers Luke the Evangelist, the author of some of the best-known and best-loved of the stories about Jesus, including those – soon to be re-enacted in a million nativity plays – of the Annunciation to Mary, of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, and of the visit of the shepherds to the baby in the manger. Other stories found only in Luke are those Jesus himself tells, such as the parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan: stories that attest to God’s forgiveness and God’s all-encompassing love.
Luke is a consummate and engaging story-teller. And, importantly, he does not stop at telling the story of Jesus himself. He seems to have intuited that the story recounted in his Gospel is but one – admittedly hugely significant – chapter in an ongoing story: one which continues right up to the present day. Unlike the other Gospel-writers, that is, Luke, is the narrator not only of the story of Jesus, but also, in his second book, the Acts of the Apostles, of the story of the Church, the Body of Christ which lives out and retells his story anew for each generation.
The account of the sending-out of the seventy, that we have just heard in today’s Gospel reading, is another one of those stories which appears only in Luke. This is, perhaps, the reason why an ancient tradition dating back to at least the fourth century suggests that Luke himself may have been one of the seventy disciples sent out to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom. There is, it must be said, absolutely nothing to suggest that this tradition is based in fact, and yet the idea that, in this story, we might in fact be witnessing Luke’s evangelistic apprenticeship is a compelling one, encouraging us to read this story as one that is highly relevant to Luke’s aims and ambitions as a re-teller, not only of the story of Jesus, but also of the story of the Church.
Already, in the first words of the passage, there are hints that this story may be working on more than one level. Why, you might ask, does Jesus send out seventy of his followers, specifically? It seems highly unlikely that this number is random, and far more likely that it is intended to have some sort of special symbolic significance. Just as Jesus’s twelve disciples recall the twelve sons of Jacob and, from them, the twelve tribes of Israel, so too the seventy followers of Jesus sent out here seem to have their origins in the Old Testament and specifically in the book of Genesis. In chapter 10 of that book, describing the renewal of the world following the Great Flood, the author lists all the nations of the world, founded by the three sons of Noah, and – yes, you’ve guessed it – the number comes to a total of seventy. Seventy, then, becomes a sort of shorthand way to indicate ‘the whole world’ or ‘all the nations’.
In sending out precisely seventy of his followers to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near, Jesus is anticipating another sending-out, the sending-out that will inaugurate the next phase of this story, the one that tells of the birth of the Church. In the opening paragraphs of the book of Acts, Luke describes how Jesus tells his followers that, following his Ascension, they will receive the Holy Spirit, before being sent out as his witnesses ‘in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’. To the ends of the earth. To people everywhere. To all the nations – yes, all seventy of them.
The first words of our Gospel reading, then, already suggest that this passage may represent a deliberate foreshadowing of what is to come after Jesus’s death – the very story that Luke will take it upon himself to recount in Acts. And this suggestion is borne out by the way in which Jesus phrases the mission with which he entrusts the seventy here, sending them on ‘ahead of him, in pairs, to every town and place where he himself intended to go’. This phrasing is curious because we, I think, habitually think of ourselves – and of all disciples – as followers of Jesus, rather than as his forerunners, sent out to walk in his footsteps rather than to prepare his way.
Jesus’s most famous forerunner is, of course, John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’. His cry, it seems, is now to be taken up by the seventy, who are sent out, like lambs into the midst of wolves, to announce Jesus’s coming. And I wonder if this going ahead of Jesus might also be symbolic. If the sending of the seventy prefigures the transmission of the Gospel to all the nations, then perhaps their mission – and, indeed, that of evangelists everywhere – is precisely to prepare those nations – near and far – not only to hear the story of Jesus himself, but also to become part of that story, as they (literally) incorporate themselves into it by becoming his body.
All of which reminds me of another story found only in Luke’s Gospel; a story in which a pair of disciples – who knows, maybe two who have been going around together since Jesus sent them out together to proclaim the Good News – find themselves walking ahead of Jesus, confused and frightened, feeling very much like lambs in the midst of wolves. On the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his companion are so caught up with the awful things that have just happened that they greet no-one and barely acknowledge – far less recognise – the stranger who catches them up on their way. They do, however, seem to have taken on board Jesus’s teaching about hospitality, because they do not hesitate to invite the stranger in to break bread with them… and it is in the breaking of the bread, of course, that they recognise him.
And is not this story too a model for the story of the growth of the church that Luke will describe in his second book? Prepare the way, be prepared to ask the hard questions, show hospitality, break bread, meet Jesus. Of those baptised on the day of Pentecost, Luke tells us that they ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’, and, in fact, the whole of Acts can be characterised as a story of travelling, offering and receiving hospitality, breaking bread, and coming to know Jesus.
We often date the ‘birthday of the Church’ back to the day of Pentecost – and with good cause. But I wonder if we might perhaps go even further back, back to the moment when Cleopas and his friend break bread with Jesus in that house at Emmaus. This moment is the moment when three individuals – the two disciples and Jesus – become a ‘we’, a unit that is bigger than any of them individually. In that moment Cleopas and his friend are no longer different from Jesus; they are – they become – part of his body.
Very subtly, our first reading too points us in this same direction. In the first part of the passage, writing about the adventures of Paul and Timothy, Luke refers to the disciples as ‘they’. But then, without any warning, Luke himself seems to become part of the story as ‘they’ becomes ‘we’. Inspired by Paul’s vision, he tells us that ‘we – not ‘they’ – tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us – not ‘them’ – to proclaim the good news’.
It is Luke’s contribution to the proclamation of the good news of Jesus and of God’s Kingdom that we celebrate today. The essence of Luke’s message is clearly revealed in our Gospel passage for today. Whether or not he was really one of the seventy sent out, Luke hints here at his own journey as an evangelist, preparing the way for Jesus and enabling others – including us – to meet him and to know him, in the fellowship that we share, in the breaking of the bread, and in something that Luke – the beloved physician – cannot have failed to recognise: Jesus’s power to heal, not only in body but in mind and spirit, his ability to bring wholeness, forgiveness and hope to the sinful, the broken, and the hopeless.
But that is not all. Because Luke’s model invites us to see ourselves not only as those who receive the message of the good news of God’s kingdom, but also, having received that message as evangelists ourselves. Luke invites us to see those who share Jesus’s story not as them but as us. We too, he assures us, can go out and prepare the way of the Lord. And he shows us the way, so that we, in turn, can show others, here and now, what it means to be follows of Jesus, enabling them to meet him, to know him, to love him, and to become his body. Luke invites us to make the song that we sang as we came into church this morning, our song as we go out from here too: ‘We have a gospel to proclaim, good news for all throughout the earth’. May that be our song today and every day. Amen.