A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The lord appointed a further 72 and sent them out in pairs before him to every town and place that he intended to visit. He said to the 72, the harvest is rich, but the workers are few. Therefore, ask the harvest master to send workers into his harvest. Now be on your way, and remember, I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves.
Do not carry a walking staff or traveling bag. Wear no sandals, and greet nobody along the way. On entering any house, first say, peace to this house. If there is a peaceable man in that house, your peace will rest upon him. If not, it will come back to you.
Stay in the one house eating and drinking what they have, for the laborer is worthy of his wage. Do not move from house to house into whatever city you go after they welcome you. Eat what they set before you and cure the sick. Say to them, the reign of god is at hand. And this is the gospel of the lord.
Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Living in the twentieth century, as most of us are doing, one of our complaints is that we have so little information, let us say, about our lord or about Saint Luke. The New Catholic Encyclopedia on the article on Saint Luke, now not on his gospel, but on the man, Luke, it's about 50 lines.
And even those 50 lines really don't say very much, because we don't know much about Luke. For the most part, all we know comes from Saint Paul, where he calls Luke a physician, which may or may not be true, where he calls him his faithful companion, which is very likely true. And we know that he was the author or he's been accepted as the author of the third synoptic gospel, although he very likely was not personally acquainted with any of the events. He was very likely not one of the 72 even that was sent out. So look how little we know about it.
You see, most of us don't realize what a terrific exception Jesus Christ is to the ancient world. By ancient, I mean two thousand years ago. Compared to almost any well, compared to any contemporary of Jesus Christ, we have a wealth of information about Jesus Christ, a wealth of information. I admit that if you put it all together, it's a book about that thick, less than an inch. I know that.
But we don't have anything like that about that is as a biographical thing about most of the people, if not all of them. We have nothing like that about Aristotle or Plato or Caesar or Cicero. Though have you ever asked yourself, why did this accumulation of documents take place? Why did people write these so called gospels? Why was it done if Christ was just another one of those eccentric religiosity people who came on the scene?
And there were plenty of them in our lord's day, plenty of them. Furthermore, why did these writings endure? Have you asked yourself that? After all, Martin Luther, Zwingli, Melanthon, Calvin, all of the so called reformers, they had the gospels in their hand. Where did they get them?
Why did they survive? It was much easier to get a hold of the Gospels in in Luther's time in the sixteenth century than it was to get a copy of Cicero's Orations or Caesar's Gallic War, that's for sure. This is a simple fact of of of history, of our of our existence, of the West of the western civilization or western culture. And Luke is one of them who contribute to the four gospels and the third synoptic. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the synoptics, meaning one view synopsis.
Then you think of of what of what this means. That what, Luke is also the accepted author of the acts of the apostles, which is the first history we have of the primitive church. Do we have anything like that, anything resembling that about any of these other religions that had cropped up in around 2000, the year 2000? And there were plenty of them. The Roman world was was had multitudes really of these marvelous people who rose up and became leaders of a small group, and very influential leaders in some instances.
And we have we this is a matter of history. This is a matter of my thinking. Easily verifiable. And, of course, Rome was receptive to all religions. Its objection to Christianity, of course, was it couldn't that this Christianity could not tolerate the emperor as a god.
That's what that's what put Rome in opposition to the to the Christians. Because they were Rome was Rome could have cared less. You you any old religion you want, bring it in, you know. They were very Catholic with a small thing. And so we come to this man Luke, but it gives us an occasion to think a bit about the good news of Jesus Christ.
If Christ was an exceptional man, as he certainly was, he was more than exceptional in what he left behind. And notice, he didn't write a word as far as we know. Please notice that. If we talk about Cicero and his books, we go to his own writings. Caesar is chiefly remembered by every schoolboy, or it used to be, by his the book he wrote on his war in Gaul.
But Christ himself didn't leave us a book. Keep that in mind. Whatever people may say about the gospels and the bible and the new testament, Christ didn't write them. Christ did did he did not write one single word of them. He he was written about, And these books that were written about him, some of them have have been preserved, and not only preserved, like an animal in a jug of alcohol in some laboratory, but they have been these these collected writings revolving around Jesus Christ, they have been who can estimate how they have changed lives, how they have changed the direction of western culture?
I'm dealing with this on a purely empirical basis, just as literature. This is a fact of life. It's a fact that we ought to we ought to remember once in a while. Because when you get there's no question about it, that familiarity does breed contempt. Yeah, that has to be modified a little bit, but there's a great deal of truth in that cliche, if you want to call it that.
And we take these things so much for granted, that throughout the whole world, today, this day of our Lord, throughout the whole world, people are reading about Luke. Why? Or they're reading about what Luke said about another person or about a group of persons way back almost two thousand years ago. Why? Why?
We're not doing it with Caesar's Gallic Wars, we're not doing it with Cicero's Orations, we're not doing it with Horace's Odes. I would like to take a poll of our congregation here this morning and ask you when you read last read an ode of Horace or an oration of Cicero. But you've read the gospel, and today we're reading the gospel according to Saint Luke, the physician of the Lord. This is a significant thing, terribly significant, that we ought not to overlook. That would however you look at it, Jesus Christ was an exceptional person.
Not only was he an exceptional person, but he had an exceptional history and has had an exceptional history. And remember, he said he would. I will be with you all days even to the consummation of the world, and he has been. In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit. Amen.