NOTES for Лк 1:1-25

The evangelist Luke offers his friend a “firm foundation” for his new faith. This does not mean that he will prove God’s existence or the truth of the apostles’ testimony to him. He will simply describe in a short book how God and humanity together sought a common language, sought a face-to-face encounter, and how they found it. In this sense, his Gospel is a kind of “synthesis,” a summation of the whole of sacred history. He begins with the story of the birth of the last prophet, John, while weaving into the narrative the broader history of God’s promises and their fulfillment. It is no accident that this account so closely resembles the story of Abraham and Sarah or that of the birth of the prophet Samuel to the barren Hannah. Their shared details—aged parents, an incredible message from an angel, doubt, and faith—lead us into a world of a special relationship with God, where a new life breaks into ordinary life, a reality difficult at first to believe: a message, or, in Greek, the Gospel.