What St Luke reveals about the Church’s mission and the Holy Ghost
St Luke closes his Gospel with a beginning: the fulfilment of prophecy, the command to preach repentance, and the promise of power from on high.
St Luke closes his Gospel with a beginning: the fulfilment of prophecy, the command to preach repentance, and the promise of power from on high.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
Why St Luke ends his Gospel by pointing to the promise of the Holy Ghost and the Church’s mission.
That Christ roots the Apostles’ preaching in prophecy fulfilled and commands them to wait for power from on high.
How St Luke’s closing vision of praise, prophecy, and Pentecost reveals the Church’s.
Fr Coleridge shows us that the Ascension marks not an ending, but the threshold of the Spirit’s work through the Church.
For more context on this section, and its place in the Gospel and the Liturgy, see Part I.
Before the Ascension
The Passage of Our Lord to the Father
Chapter XVI
St. Matt. xxviii. 16-20; St. Mark xvi. 14-18; St. Luke xxiv. 44-49.
Story of the Gospels, § 180
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
What Trinity Sunday tells us about the Church’s indefectible authority
What St Luke reveals about the Church’s mission and the Holy Ghost
Termination of St Luke's Gospel
We have next to consider the closing words of the third and most historical Gospel, which alone among the four adds the few words which we have quoted concerning the mystery of the Ascension. These words are also to be considered in conjunction with the opening verses of the other volume which the Church owes to the same loving authorship as this Gospel, in which the Life of our Lord is carried on in the Church.
As St. Matthew and St. Mark may seem in their parting words to have fastened each upon some particular aspect or feature in our Lord’s Life, congenial to their own narratives, so we shall find it to be in the case of the third Gospel.
The termination of this Gospel follows very closely on the long account given by this Evangelist, of that most interesting conversation held by our Lord with the two disciples whom He had joined in their walk to the little village of Emmaus, on the afternoon of Easter Day, and to whom He had revealed Himself in the significant action of the breaking of bread in His own solemn and devotional manner.
It was therefore very near to the beginning of this Easter season, but the history of St. Luke flows calmly on without any perceptible break to the very ending of the record, speaking before it closes of the Ascension and of what ensued after it, and closing with a short description of the Apostolic company as ‘being always in the Temple, praising and blessing God.’
Understandings opened to understand the Scripture
The main burthen of what our Lord said to them on this occasion seems to have been His insisting on the complete correspondence between the predictions concerning Himself and the fulfilment of those predictions, and on the duty and mission of the Apostles of bringing out to the world this perfect correspondence.
‘And He said to them, These are the words which I spoke to you while I was yet with you, that all things must needs be fulfilled which are written in the Law of Moses and in the Prophets and in the Psalms, concerning Me.’
It is added in the second place, that then He opened their understandings that they might understand the Scriptures.
We may think that this opening of the understanding was not conveyed by any course of special instruction, such as may have been the explanation of the prophecies and typical anticipations of which Holy Writ is so full, an explanation which had been to some extent already conveyed to them in their walk to Emmaus, but it appears to have been some spiritual gift which issued in the imparting some special enlightenment as to the subject-matter and meaning of Holy Scripture generally, including, no doubt, some peculiar intelligence as far as regarded our Lord.
This gift was no doubt one of the fruits of the Holy Ghost, and became largely diffused among the faithful in proportion as the Church increased, though it may primarily have been imparted to some more specially devoted to these sacred volumes. Our Lord gave them a special injunction at this time.
‘And He said to them: Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His Name unto all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.’
It was this message which He took occasion at this time to confide especially to the Apostles, ‘And you are witnesses of these things,’ and in order that they might be empowered and encouraged for this almighty work He added, ‘And I send the promise of My Father upon you’—a promise to be conferred on them at a carefully given, though not precisely specified time, a time which though not defined was limited by Him to within a few days—‘not many days hence,’ in His words at the Ascension.
Now He adds:
‘But stay you in the city, until you be endued with power from on high.’
To these words St. Luke subjoins a short account of the Ascension, and with this his volume closes, although, as we happily know, he was guided afterwards to resume his work, when the time came for the precious volume of the Acts of the Apostles to be written by him.
St Luke preparing for the advent of the Holy Ghost
As we have noticed that the other Evangelists appear to have been directed by the Holy Spirit to select as the last points which they mention in closing their accounts of the sayings and doings of our Divine Lord, each some words or actions which are in harmony with some prominent characteristic on which their minds had fastened in the general history, so we may also see in the conclusion of this third Gospel, that St. Luke has been fain to set before Christians the words of our Lord which contained a very near warning to the Apostles that the greatest of all the gifts which were to be imparted to men in consequence of the Sacrifice of the Cross, was to be looked for within a few days from the time at which He was speaking.
Throughout the Gospel before us, there is constant reference to this great gift of the Paraclete, as the great boon which the Church was to be possessed of as the next great gift of God. It would be superfluous for those familiar with the Gospel of St. Luke to draw this out in any fulness, and it must be left at present to the diligence of the reader.
If so much was not said by our Lord during the earlier part of the time of His dealings with His Apostles, it may be remembered that we have the record, not so much of what He said to them at the time, as the record of what it was well for Him in His wisdom and intimate knowledge of the hearts with which He conversed, to think it expedient to speak about publicly.
The angels desiring the sight of what He produces
We have had occasion in the preceding pages to point out the gradual expansion, even in His most intimate teaching to the Twelve, of what related to the Divine Person of the Holy Ghost. But no one can carefully study the Gospel before us, and fail to see, we think, that there is a continual silent reference to the gift of which we are speaking.
The full imparting of knowledge concerning the great truths, such as the Divine Trinity itself, was for long gradually disclosed, yet the truth as concerning the Paraclete seems so to lie in the mind of Sacred Scripture as to be more and more disclosed in this Gospel of St. Luke, and we see that it may even be considered that the dominant thought, if such must be selected as characteristic of this blessed Evangelist, is that which it was his special blessing to have witnessed in the glories of the first generations of the Gentile Church under the influence of the Holy Ghost sent from Heaven, ‘on whom,’ in the words of St. Peter, ‘the Angels desire to look.’
The words of the Apostle deserve notice. He is speaking of the prophets of old, who were eager to understand the things revealed to them concerning our Lord:
‘Searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ in them did signify, when it foretold those sufferings that are in Christ, and the glories that should follow, to whom it was revealed that not to themselves but to you they ministered those things which are now declared to you by those that have preached the Gospel to you, the Holy Ghost being sent down from Heaven, on whom the Angels desire to look.’
It cannot be doubted that the Evangelist who makes it his office to draw out most carefully the prophetic anticipations concerning our Lord’s Life is especially St. Matthew. Yet St. Luke seems to delight most of all in bringing out what our Blessed. Lady and the holy Zachary speak of in their Canticles, Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini ejus in sæcula, or again, Ad faciendam misericordiam cum patribus nostris et memorari testamenti sui sancti.
These glories were to be brought out in time by the power of the Holy Ghost, and the execution of these wonders the Apostle speaks of as the work of the Holy Ghost upon earth, on the carrying out of which the Holy Angels gaze with joy and wonder.
Passage in the Acts
A very great subject of thought, unless we are mistaken, is contained in these few words of St. Peter, which fall from him almost as what we call words by the way for he had no special call, as far as we can see, to enter on the subject of the interest taken by the Holy Angels in the progress of the work of the Church in the world, the greatness of which forced itself on their notice.
His words remind us of the similar outburst of delight to which St. Luke gives way, when he relates the great conversions wrought during the stay of St. Paul at Ephesus, when those who had followed curious arts, as he calls them, brought together their books and burnt them before all, and counting the price of them they found the money to be fifty thousand pieces of silver.’ St. Luke adds, ‘So mightily grew the Word of God and was confirmed.’
On both occasions the writer lets himself for a moment loose, as we often say, and lets us into the secret of what things they are, on which he delights to speak; and St. Peter seems to speak as if he were admitted to the knowledge of what things the holy dwellers in Heaven took an especial pleasure in having set before their eyes in the glorious labours and sufferings and triumph of the Gospel progress over the world. St. Luke is particularly delighted with the zeal of the new converts in destroying, at a great cost to themselves, all the instruments which they formerly used in their following the black art. It is in the progress of the results of the successful preaching of the Word of God that Angelic and Apostolic hearts find their great joy.
Surely we may well understand how the heart of this blessed Evangelist swelled within him as he thought over the glorious achievements of which he had been the witness, and in which it had been his lot to take a silent but not an inactive part, and that to him the fruitful workings of the Holy Ghost, the advent of Whom into the world it had been his lot to witness and write the history of, was a dominant and engrossing thought, giving, to a certain extent, the colour which he most delighted to dwell upon, that to him the Gospel history itself was the natural prelude and foundation for the ‘glories which should follow’ in the triumphant spreading of the Catholic Church over the whole world, of which St. Peter speaks in his Epistle.
In the next part, Fr Coleridge explains how St John treats Our Lord’s final acts before his Ascension and closes his Gospel.
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Before the Ascension
What Trinity Sunday tells us about the Church’s indefectible authority
What St Luke reveals about the Church’s mission and the Holy Ghost
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