Introduction

After finishing the Letter to the Ephesians, I have moved on to the Gospel of Luke for my lectio. This choice is to complement my study – we are looking at Luke’s Gospel and Acts in my Scripture classes.
All the Gospels have their own perspective and texture. When I think of Luke’s Gospel I imagine a rich cloth woven from many strands of thread, which include the Infancy Narratives, stories of Our Lady St Mary, parables including the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, many healing miracles and Jesus’ teaching on prayer.

Lectio

After almost three weeks of reading the first ten chapters of this Gospel, I am left with the overarching impression of the power of God, and the greatness of God, seen in Jesus’ miracles and in the words of his preaching. This is apparent even before Jesus is born – we are told at the Annunciation that:

He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High (1: 32).

and at the Visitation Mary sings in the Magnificat:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit exults in God my saviour (1: 46-47).

This anticipation of God’s great goodness, displayed in his act of sending his son among us, is a source of rejoicing; sometimes I can feel my soul soar up in wonder at God’s greatness and rest in the experience of this knowledge. There is also here a call to give witness to the Lord – this translation says Mary ‘proclaims the greatness of the Lord’ – which has the sense of going out and telling people about this greatness. Mary does this within the context of her ordinary life – she is proclaiming to her relatives. I hear this as a call for me to recognise the evangelical quality of my vocation as a Benedictine nun – I proclaim the greatness of God every day when I sing the Divine Office in choir with the rest of the community. It is good that I should deepen my awareness of what I am doing – and feel and express that ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ about which Pope Francis wrote. This call to witness is a call to discipleship:

Your duty is to go and spread the news of the kingdom of God (9: 60).

God’s greatness is seen in the power which is manifest in Jesus’ works:

And the Power of the Lord was behind his works of healing (5: 17).

Everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all (6: 19).

These healing miracles can come about because of the faith of those who request the healings. For example, Jesus says to Jairus and his wife, before bringing back their daughter from the dead:

Do not be afraid, only have faith and she will be safe (8: 50),

and he commends the faith of a gentile centurion saying:

I tell you, not even in Israel have I found faith like this (7: 9).

Again and again, Jesus shows in his miracles how faith in God’s power can transform our lives. He exhorts his disciples to have faith in his own teaching and instructions:

Everyone who comes to me and listens to my words and acts on them – I will show you what he is like. He is like a man who when he built his house dug, and dug deep, and laid the foundations on rock; when the river was in flood it bore down on that house but could not shake it, it was so well built (6: 47-48).

So how do we increase our faith. We cannot do better than to follow the example of Our Lady:

As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart (2: 19).

What are ‘these things’? For Mary, they were events in her life, and that of her son, Jesus. We, too, have our own things to ponder: times when we can see the action of God in our lives, and the sacred Scriptures, particularly the stories of Jesus and Mary.

Prayer

O God, we thank you for the rich source of teaching you have given us in the Gospel of Luke. Give us the grace to welcome it with the simplicity of little children, to ponder it in our hearts, to grow in faith like good seeds in rich soil and so to bear joyful witness to your Good News in our lives. Amen.