Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
You are opening the longest book in the New Testament, and the only one in it written by a doctor. Luke never names himself in his own pages, but Paul does, three times, calling him a fellow worker, a companion who stayed when others left, and once the beloved physician. He travelled with Paul; you can hear it in the book of Acts, where the narrative slips without warning from they to we, as though a man who had been keeping careful notes suddenly stepped into his own story. By the near-unanimous witness of the early church, Luke was a Gentile, which makes him the only writer of any part of Scripture who was not a Jew. He wrote two volumes, this Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, and both are addressed to the same man, Theophilus. Put those two volumes side by side and they come to more of the New Testament than the apostle Paul wrote. And unlike the other Gospel writers, Luke opens by telling us plainly how he worked. Many, he says, have already undertaken to set down an account. He is aware of them. He has gone to the eyewitnesses, the people who were there at the beginning and who had handed the story down. He has investigated everything carefully. And now he writes it out in order, for a named reader, with a stated purpose: so that Theophilus may know the certainty of what he has already been taught. That is not the preface of a man spinning a legend. It is the preface of a careful investigator laying his evidence on the table. Read this Gospel the way it was written, slowly, and watch what a physician noticed.
As you read, hold this: A Gentile physician who investigated everything from the beginning writes an orderly account so that any reader may know the certainty of it, and what he sets down is the Son of Man going out after the lost, gathering in shepherds and Samaritans and tax collectors and one dying criminal, all the way to an empty tomb.
The name and what it means
The word that governs this Gospel is the verb standing at the center of its thesis statement, spoken by Jesus in a tax collector’s house in Jericho. In Greek it is ζητέω (zēteō), pronounced zay-TEH-oh (Strong’s G2212), and it means to seek, to search out, to go looking for something. It is not a quiet word. It is the ordinary Greek verb for hunting through a house for a thing you have lost, for combing a hillside, for going out and not coming back until you have found what you went out for. It carries effort in it, and intent, and a certain refusal to be satisfied. When Luke reports the Lord saying that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost, he is not describing a Savior who makes Himself available and then waits to see who turns up. He is describing a Savior who goes out.
And once you have that verb in your hand, chapter fifteen opens like a door. There the Lord tells three stories back to back, and every one of them is about something lost and somebody going after it. A shepherd counts a hundred sheep, comes up one short, leaves the ninety-nine in the open country, and goes after the one until he finds it. A woman loses a silver coin in a dim house with a dirt floor, lights a lamp, takes a broom, and sweeps every corner searching carefully until it turns up. And then a father, who cannot go looking because his son has walked off on his own two feet into a far country, watches the road. When the boy finally appears in the distance, ragged and rehearsing his speech, the old man does the thing no dignified head of a household in that world would ever do. He gathers up his robes and runs.
Sheep, coin, son. A searching shepherd, a sweeping woman, a running father. Three pictures of the same God, and Luke sets all three of them down in a row because one picture was not enough. Notice why the Lord told them at all: the religious men were grumbling that He received sinners and ate with them. He answered the grumble with three stories about joy over one recovered thing, and heaven singing about it. That is zēteō. Hold it as you read, because it is what this whole book is doing.
The world of the book
Luke writes for the Roman world, and he anchors his account in that world the way a careful historian does, with dates and names anyone could go and check. The birth of Jesus arrives in his second chapter tied to a decree of Caesar Augustus and a census taken while Quirinius governed Syria. The ministry of John the Baptist is dated to the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, with Pontius Pilate governing Judea, Herod Antipas over Galilee, his brother Philip over the territory to the northeast, and the high priesthood in the hands of Annas and Caiaphas. Luke keeps doing this. He plants the story of Jesus in datable public history, among rulers whose names are cut into stone and struck on coins, because he is not telling a tale that happened once upon a time in a place nobody could find. He is reporting what happened in the reign of a particular emperor, in a particular occupied province, on a particular Friday.
That province was small and it was held down. Judea and Galilee lived under Rome, taxed by Rome, garrisoned by Rome, judged in the end by a Roman governor who had the power of execution. Around and beyond it lay the Greco-Roman social order, and that order was a ladder. Honor and shame ran everything. Where you sat at a banquet, whose patronage you enjoyed, whose name you could drop, whether your word was accepted in a court: all of it was fixed by birth and wealth and reputation. And it is precisely there that Luke’s Gospel does something quietly astonishing. Look at who keeps standing in the middle of his pages. Shepherds, men whose trade kept them out in the fields and out of polite company, are the first to be told. Women are named, followed, thanked, and recorded as funding the ministry out of their own means. The poor are blessed and the hungry filled. A Samaritan, a member of a despised people, is the one who stops on the Jericho road and is held up forever as the neighbor. Tax collectors are called down out of trees and invited to dinner. Lepers, shut out of the town by law, are cleansed, and the one who comes back to give thanks is a Samaritan too.
In that world these were people who counted for very little. In this Gospel they are at the center of the frame. This is the Gospel of the outsider, and once you see the pattern you will see it on nearly every page. It is also the Gospel of prayer: Jesus prays at every hinge of the story, at His baptism, before He chooses the Twelve, before Peter’s confession, on the mountain of transfiguration, in Gethsemane, and from the cross itself. It is the Gospel of the Holy Spirit, who fills Elizabeth and Zechariah and Simeon before the ministry has even begun. It is the Gospel of joy and of songs, and the first two chapters ring with them: Mary’s song, Zechariah’s, the angels’ over the fields, and old Simeon’s in the temple with a baby in his arms. And it is the Gospel of meals. A remarkable amount of this book happens at a table, with the wrong people at it. Luke also preserves parables nobody else records, and they are among the ones the world knows best: the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisee and the tax collector.
The shape of the book
- The births of John and Jesus, and their songs (chapters 1 and 2). Gabriel in the temple, an old priest struck silent, the announcement to a girl in Nazareth, the meeting of two expectant mothers, and the songs that pour out of them. Then the census, the manger, the shepherds, the presentation in the temple with Simeon and Anna, and a twelve-year-old boy left behind in His Father’s house.
- John’s preaching, the baptism, the genealogy, and the temptation (chapters 3 and 4). The wilderness voice calling for repentance, the heavens opened and the Father’s voice, a family tree that runs backward past Abraham all the way to Adam and to God, forty days of testing in the desert, and a hometown sermon in Nazareth that nearly gets Him thrown off a cliff.
- The Galilean ministry and the calling of disciples (chapters 5 and 6). Nets breaking with fish, a leper cleansed, a paralyzed man let down through a roof, a tax collector called from his booth, running arguments about the Sabbath, the choosing of the Twelve after a night of prayer, and the Sermon on the Plain with its blessings and its woes.
- Widening circles of mercy, the parables, the confession and the transfiguration (chapters 7 through 9). A centurion’s faith, a widow’s son raised at Nain, a sinful woman weeping at His feet, the women who followed and provided, the storm stilled, a girl raised, five thousand fed, Peter’s confession, the first plain word about the cross, and the glory on the mountain.
- The long journey to Jerusalem (9:51 through 19:27). This is the heart of Luke and the largest single stretch of it. He sets His face toward Jerusalem and everything from here is on the road: the seventy-two sent out, the Good Samaritan, Mary and Martha, teaching on prayer, the rich fool, the narrow door, the great banquet, the cost of following, the lost sheep and coin and son, the shrewd manager, the rich man and Lazarus, the persistent widow, the Pharisee and the tax collector, blind Bartimaeus at Jericho, and Zacchaeus in a sycamore tree.
- The entry, the temple, and the final teaching (chapters 19 through 21). The descent from the Mount of Olives with the crowds shouting, the tears over the city, the cleansing of the temple, days of teaching and testing in its courts, a poor widow and her two small coins, and the discourse about what is coming.
- The Last Supper, the arrest, and the trials (chapter 22). The upper room and the bread and the cup, an argument about greatness at that very table, Gethsemane, the kiss, Peter’s denial and the look that met it, and the questioning before the council, before Pilate, and before Herod.
- The crucifixion (chapter 23). The sentence, the road to the skull, the women who wept, two criminals, a prayer for the men driving the nails, a promise made to a dying thief, darkness over the land, the torn curtain, and a borrowed tomb.
- The empty tomb, the Emmaus road, and the ascension (chapter 24). Women at dawn with spices, a stone rolled away, two disciples walking home in grief and a stranger opening the Scriptures to them, burning hearts and a loaf broken, the risen Lord standing among them, and hands lifted in blessing as He is carried up.
The one thread to carry
If you carry one thing through these twenty-four chapters, carry this: the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost, and He does not stop seeking. Luke tells you at the outset that he has done his homework, and he tells you why, and it is worth pausing over the reason. He is not writing to impress. He is writing so that a reader can be sure.
"Therefore, having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught." Luke 1:3–4 (BSB)
Certainty. That is the aim of the whole book, and every careful detail in it serves that aim. Then, when the ministry opens, Luke has Jesus stand up in the synagogue at Nazareth, unroll the scroll of Isaiah, and read out His own job description in the words of a prophet who had died seven hundred years before.
"“The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed," Luke 4:18 (BSB)
The poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. He rolled up the scroll and said that today this was fulfilled in their hearing, and then He went out and did exactly that, for fifteen chapters of road. And at the end of the journey, standing in the house of the most despised man in Jericho, with the whole town muttering outside about the company He kept, He said the sentence that this Gospel exists to prove.
Luke 19:10 (BSB) — “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Watch how far that seeking goes. It reaches shepherds on a night shift and a girl in a village nobody respected. It reaches a Samaritan village and a tax booth and a leper colony. And on the last day of His life, nailed to a cross with nothing left to give, He is still at it: a criminal dying beside Him asks to be remembered, and receives a promise of paradise that same day. The searching did not stop at the foot of the cross. It went on from the cross.
There is one more thing worth seeing before you begin, a bracket that holds the whole book together. Luke opens in the temple, with an old priest at the altar of incense who is given news too good to take in and comes out unable to say a word. Luke closes with the same building and the opposite sound. A risen Christ has walked seven miles with two heartbroken disciples, opened the Scriptures to them, and been recognized in the breaking of bread. Then He lifts His hands and blesses them, and they go back to Jerusalem with great joy and are found, the last words of the book, “praising God continually in the temple.” Silence at the beginning, praise at the end, and between them a Savior who went out looking. Read Luke as one of the lost who has been found. Learn the Word, keep your eyes on the Son of Man who came to seek, and give thanks.