Sermon for the Sunday of St Luke the Apostle and Evangelist

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Today we honour the holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke. St Paul calls him “Luke the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14). He was a doctor, and he noticed the people, who others ignored.

Luke was also St Paul’s faithful companion. In the Acts of the Apostles he begins to write “we”, because he was there. He sailed with Paul and was shipwrecked with him. Paul calls him one of his “fellow workers” (Philemon 24). And at the very end, when Paul sat in prison in Rome waiting for his death, others had gone. Paul wrote, “Luke alone is with me” (2 Timothy 4:11). The doctor stayed with his friend until the last.

If we had only Matthew, Mark and John, we would be missing some of the best-loved stories in the whole Bible. They come to us only through St Luke.

Without Luke there would be no Good Samaritan. There would be no Prodigal Son, and no father who “saw him and had compassion” (Luke 15:20). We would not have the story of the lost coin, or the rich man and poor Lazarus at his gate. We would never meet Zacchaeus up his tree, or the one leper in ten who came back to say thank you. We would not hear of the widow of Nain, whose only son was being carried out to burial. Of her Luke says simply that the Lord “had compassion on her” (Luke 7:13).

Look at who fills these stories. Widows. Lepers. Beggars. Tax collectors. Sinners. A Samaritan, who was an outsider. These are the poor and the needy, and Luke loves them because Christ loves us all.

In Luke the Lord says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). And it is Luke who gives us that great summary of the whole Gospel: “the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

Even at the very end, Luke gives us a story no one else tells. A thief hangs dying on a cross. He asks to be remembered. And Christ answers, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).

There is one person Luke treasures above all. That is the Mother of God.

Almost everything we know of her early life comes from Luke. He tells us of the angel’s greeting, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28). He tells us of her visit to Elizabeth, and of the child leaping for joy in Elizabeth’s womb. He gives us her song, the Magnificat. In it she says, “henceforth all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). And even her song is about the poor. God “has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:53).

Luke watches her closely and gently. Twice he tells us that she “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). He records Simeon’s words that “a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:35). Who else but she could have told him these things?

So it is fitting that the Church’s tradition remembers Luke as the first to paint an icon of the Theotokos. He painted her in words, and tradition says he painted her in colour too. When we stand before her icon, we stand in a line that goes back to him.

St Luke was a careful writer and a tender one. Through his pen, the poor are lifted up, the lost are found, and the Mother of God is honoured in every generation.

But Luke’s stories are not only about other people. They are about us. Each of us is somewhere in them.

Some days we are the younger son, far from home and hungry. Some days we are the elder brother, standing outside, unwilling to join the feast. Sometimes we are the priest who passes by on the other side, and sometimes the Samaritan who stops. We can be Zacchaeus, curious and hiding in a tree. We can be one of the nine lepers who were healed and simply walked away. Or we can be the one who turned back to give thanks.

And none of us is fixed in one part. The story is not over. Zacchaeus came down from his tree. The younger son got up and went home. The thief on the cross turned to Christ in his very last hour. At every moment, the choice is set before us again. To pass by, or to stop. To walk away, or to turn back. To stay outside, or to come in.

And at every moment, Luke shows us the same Lord. He is the father who sees us while we are still far off and runs to meet us. He is the shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep. He is the one who calls Zacchaeus by name.

That is the joy of St Luke’s Gospel. Whoever we are in the story, and wherever we have been, there is still a place at the feast, and a name written in heaven.

Through the prayers of the holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke, may Christ our God have mercy on us and save us. Amen.