Today's reading completes the evangelist's account of the birth of John the Baptist. It is notable that Luke's conclusion of the account of this event follows immediately after...
Today's reading completes the evangelist's account of the birth of John the Baptist. It is notable that Luke's conclusion of the account of this event follows immediately after the account of the Annunciation, which turns out to be included within the account of John's miraculous conception and birth. This composition of the first chapter of the Gospel is clearly not accidental. Each of the evangelists describes in his own way the reality of what theologians today call the Incarnation. For Luke, as we can see, it has first of all a historical, or more precisely, a philosophy-of-history dimension.
This approach was not something completely new: the sacred texts that existed in early Christian times (the Pentateuch, the Former Prophets, and the Latter Prophets) were likewise works concerned with the meaning of history. They presented the history of the people of God as the history of Revelation. And the history of Revelation was, naturally, above all the history of God's relationship with the human being. It is no surprise that it was chiefly the history of prophets and righteous people: one can learn about revelation only through the testimony of those who hear God and are not afraid to testify to what they have heard.
For Luke, who knew how Jesus evaluated the ministry of John the Baptist (Luke 7:28), this prophet clearly became a symbol of prophetic ministry as such, a kind of quintessence of the entire prophetic tradition. It is no accident that the evangelist describes his miraculous birth in such detail, as if making it clear that God Himself points to John as the one who will complete what the prophets of former times had begun. And Luke describes the birth of the Messiah-Christ as an event that proves to be the center and meaning of the whole history of Revelation.
In this respect the composition of the first chapter partly resembles the composition of an Eastern icon, where what is shown in the center and in the foreground is usually not what three-dimensional perspective requires, but what is the center of meaning in what is depicted. In Luke, this composition has an additional meaning: the Nativity of Christ is woven into the fabric of history, even if it is portrayed symbolically, and yet it is entirely real. In this way Luke expressed the truth of what today is usually called the Incarnation, without which the whole history of Revelation would have remained incomplete.
