Luke — who's who

The Lukan Jesus eats with sinners and tax collectors at every opportunity Luke gives him; pays attention to women and Samaritans; praises a foreigner's faith over a religious insider's, repeatedly. He is the Jesus of the great parables — the prodigal son's father, the good Samaritan, the lost sheep, the Pharisee and the tax collector. He prays more in Luke than in any other gospel, often alone on a mountain, often through the night. At the end he prays for his executioners from the cross, promises the repentant thief a place in paradise, and dies with a verse from the Psalms — Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. He rises on the third day and walks seven miles with two disappointed disciples before he lets them recognize him.

Luke gives Mary more material than any other gospel — the annunciation by Gabriel in chapter 1, the visit to Elizabeth in the hill country, the Magnificat, the birth narrative, the presentation in the temple, the Simeon prophecy that a sword will pierce her own soul, the loss and finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, and the recurring note that she pondered all these things in her heart. The Magnificat she sings in 1:46-55 is one of the great political poems of the Bible — the proud scattered, the mighty pulled down, the hungry filled, the rich sent empty away — and Luke gives it to her without any sense that it is unusual for an unmarried pregnant teenager from a small town in Galilee to be the one who speaks it.

An elderly priestly couple in the hill country of Judea, both barren, both righteous before God. The angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah in the temple while he is offering incense and tells him Elizabeth will bear a son named John. Zechariah doubts and is struck mute until the boy is born. When the pregnant Mary visits Elizabeth in the sixth month, the child in her womb leaps, and Elizabeth is filled with the Spirit and recognizes Mary as the mother of her Lord. At the naming of John, Zechariah's tongue is loosed and he prophesies — the Benedictus, the second canticle of the gospel. Together they hold the door open between the old prophetic order and what is about to begin.

Two elderly figures who recognize the infant Jesus when his parents bring him to the temple for purification. Simeon is a righteous and devout man to whom the Spirit had revealed that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's anointed; he comes into the temple led by the Spirit, takes the child in his arms, and sings the Nunc Dimittis: now let your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation. He warns Mary that a sword will pierce her own soul also. Anna is an eighty-four-year-old widow who has lived in the temple in fasting and prayer; she comes up at that very moment, gives thanks, and speaks of the child to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.

A Roman centurion whose servant is sick at the point of death. He does not approach Jesus directly — he sends Jewish elders who testify that he loves the Jewish nation and built their synagogue. As Jesus approaches, the centurion sends a second message: do not trouble yourself; I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof; but say the word and let my servant be healed. I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. Jesus marvels — Luke uses the word for amazement that Jesus more usually elicits in others — and says he has not found such faith, not even in Israel.

Not a person in the narrative but the central figure of the parable Jesus tells in chapter 15 — and the most carefully drawn figure in any of the gospels. He has two sons. The younger demands his inheritance and wastes it. When the younger comes to himself in a pig pen and decides to walk home as a hired servant, the father sees him from a great distance, has compassion, runs (a thing dignified men did not do in that culture), embraces him, kisses him, calls for the best robe and the ring and the fatted calf. When the older son refuses to come in, the father goes out and pleads with him. The parable ends without telling us whether the older son comes in. What God is, on the parable's reading, is whatever the father in the parable is.