NOTES for Luk 1:1-4

These first lines of the Gospel contain one of the greatest mysteries of the New Testament. Beginning his narrative, Luke addresses a certain most excellent Theophilus, who was, by all appearances, his disciple. This address turns the whole text from an abstract legend into a very personal story that one person wants to share with another. The evangelist does not begin with loud words and weighty phrases; it is far more important to him to explain to his reader exactly what must be known about the life of Christ.

Christianity is not a set of doctrines and rules, but a living faith passed from heart to heart. It is a faith that lives in the relationships of people who, just like Luke and Theophilus, want to share with one another the joyful news of the life, death, and resurrection of the Savior.

The Gospel according to Luke does not begin as the other Gospels do. Usually the Gospel narrative opens with events connected in one way or another with Jesus Himself; Luke, however, prefaces his account with the story of the miraculous conception of John the Baptist. Of course, John the Baptist will play his own, extremely important and entirely unique, role in the Gospel events. And yet none of the evangelists gives him as much attention as Luke. Usually the Gospels describe John already as a preacher, appearing as if from nowhere, as if he had been born in the very wilderness where his preaching sounded. Luke, as we can see, wants to set this mysterious figure within the real history of which John's activity was a part. But he by no means denies the miracle in what is happening: John's conception and birth were undoubtedly connected with God's direct intervention in the events taking place in Jerusalem, in the family of the priest named Zechariah (vv. 5-20).

Here before us is a situation described more than once in the Old Testament: a child is born to a childless married couple when, in the natural way, it is completely clear that he can no longer come into the world. It is no surprise that the birth of such a child was perceived as a miracle, as the direct action of God, who in this case makes real an event that is, if not directly impossible, then at least nearly incredible. And of course, like every miracle of God, the miracle of John's birth remains for us in many ways a mystery - the same as, for example, the mystery of Isaac's birth. But this mystery has nothing in common with the aura of obscurity with which popular rumor surrounded the figure of John when he went out to preach.

Perhaps Luke begins his Gospel with the account of John's miraculous birth precisely because by the time he wrote it too many legends had already appeared both about John and, perhaps, even about Jesus Himself (vv. 1-4). Later these legends, born of a stormy Eastern imagination, became the basis of apocryphal literature, where the image of Christ often acquired completely fantastic features and miracles took on chimerical forms. Luke lets us feel the breath of a true miracle, for which there is always room in the world - a miracle that is near and at the same time does not cease to be mystery. Like the Kingdom itself.

The Evangelist intends to lead his account from the beginning. But what event does he place at the beginning of the narrative? Luke chooses not the Nativity of Jesus, not the beginning of His preaching, and not even the preaching of John that preceded it. No, the story begins with a description of the events that came before John's birth, when hardly anyone could have imagined that the proclamation of the New Covenant was drawing near. The beginning matures quietly; it is hidden in the midst of Old Testament everyday life.

The angel tells Zechariah that his wife, no longer young, will become the mother of a great prophet. This had happened more than once in Israel; here there is, as it were, a repetition of what we have read more than once on the pages of the Old Testament. But the new thing that would soon be preached would not contradict the former one; it would be a further disclosure of the old revelation.

Zechariah did not believe the angel, so it is easy to see his muteness only as a punishment for weak faith. But this forced silence is also a path of inner recollection, an opportunity for prayerful concentration. Zechariah is silent about what has been revealed to him, and Elizabeth likewise hides her pregnancy until the appointed time. Both of them needed to carry through solitude what would become the main content of their later lives. The most important events often mature in quiet.

The Evangelist Luke offers his friend a "firm foundation" for his new faith. This does not mean that he will prove to him the existence of God or the truth of the apostles' witness. He will simply describe for him, in a small book, how God and man together sought a common language, sought a face-to-face meeting, and how they found it. In this sense his Gospel is a kind of "synthesis," a summary of all sacred history.

He begins with the story of the birth of the last prophet, John, but along the way he weaves into the narrative the whole history of God's promises and their fulfillments. It is no accident that this story is so similar to the account of Abraham and Sarah or to the birth of the prophet Samuel to barren Hannah. The shared details - elderly parents, an unbelievable message from an angel, doubt and faith - introduce us into the world of special relations with God, where a new life breaks into ordinary life, a life whose reality is hard to believe at first, a message, or, in Greek, Gospel.