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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 587. The Friend
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The Friend
1. Foremost among the qualities which equipped Luke for the work of comradeship to which the providence of God had called him was his consecrated culture. Both Luke and Paul had a genuine love of learning, but the scholarship of the one differed in details from that of the other. Paul's mind was of a deeper, more philosophic mould than that of Luke. And Luke's was more artistic. The resultant interplay of mind upon mind must have been to the mutual advantage of each. We owe to the pen of Luke an almost perfect portrait of his friend. And we have but to read the Third Gospel carefully, noting the while the studied use of such characteristically Pauline words as “faith,” “mercy,” “grace,” and “remission,” to see the debt that Luke owed to Paul. The accurate scholarship and literary genius of Luke, his rare gift of observation, his careful mode of expression, his capacity for taking pains, which even his easy and polished sentences fail to hide, his refined and sensitive nature, together with his oneness with the high ideals of Paul's ministry, made him peculiarly the man whom the Apostle needed.
Luke had a habit, too, of deliberate self-effacement, and we search in vain for any reference to himself in his writings. He is content to be historian and biographer, but he is careful to make succeeding generations discover for themselves the authorship of this finest biographical fragment in the world.
In society and politics we call those great who have devoted their energies to some noble cause, or have influenced the course of things in some extraordinary way. But in every instance, whether in art, science, or religion, or public life, there is a universal condition, that a man shall have forgotten himself in his work. If any fraction of his attention is given to the honours or rewards which success will bring him, there will be a taint of weakness in what he does.1 [Note: J. A. Froude.]
In his writings Walter Pater shrinks from all definiteness and avoids, by the very habit of his mind, anything like unqualified assertion, employing the impersonal method of parable, or story, or criticism. But throughout, it is a veil which hides nothing that it is profitable for us to know. In Pater's view, such reticence and self-effacing is but a true man's modesty.2 [Note: J. A. Huttou, Pilgrims in the Region of Faith, 70.]
2. Under the surface of Luke's narrative of Paul's journeys and labours there moves a current of strong personal affection and enthusiastic admiration for him. Paul is the author's hero. His general aim is to describe the development of the Church; but his affection and his interest turn to Paul, and after a time his narrative groups itself round Paul. He is keenly concerned to show that Paul was in perfect accord with the leaders among the older Apostles, but so also was Paul himself in his letters. That is the point of view of a personal friend and disciple, full of affection, and jealous of Paul's honour and reputation.
The characterization of Paul in Acts is so detailed and individualized as to prove the author's personal acquaintance. Moreover, the Paul of Acts is the Paul that appears to us in his own letters, in his ways and his thoughts, in his educated tone of polished courtesy, in his quick and vehement temper, in the extraordinary versatility and adaptability which made him at home in every society, moving at ease in all surroundings, and everywhere the centre of interest, whether he is the Socratic dialectician in the agora of Athens, or the rhetorician in its university, or conversing with kings and proconsuls, or advising in the council on shipboard, or cheering a broken-spirited crew to make one more effort for life. Wherever Paul is, no one present has eyes for any but him.
Probably Boswell did not realize how matchless a biographer he was, though he was not disposed to belittle his own performances. But his unbridled interest in the smallest details, his power of hero-worship, his amazing style, his perception, his astonishing memory and the training he gave it, his superb dramatic faculty, which enabled him to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and to subordinate them all to his central emphasis-all these qualities are undeniable.1 [Note: A. C. Benson.]
What we want in a biography, and what, despite the etymology of the title, we very seldom find, is life. The very best transcript is a failure, if it be a transcript only. To fulfil its idea, it must have in it the essential quality of movement; must realize the lofty fiction of the divine Shield of Achilles, where the upturning earth, though wrought in metal, darkened as the plough went on; and the figures of the battle-piece dealt their strokes and parried them, and dragged out from the turmoil the bodies of their dead.2 [Note: W. E. Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, ii.]
3. Throughout the journeyings, it is remarkable with what interest Luke records the incidents from harbour to harbour. He has the true Greek feeling for the sea, a feeling that must develop in every race possessing any capacity for development, and any sensitiveness to the influences of nature, when settled round the Ægean coasts; for the Ægean Sea is so tempting, with its regular winds and regular sunset calm, when the water lies dead, with a surface which looks like oil, dense and glistening and dark, that it seems to invite one to walk upon it.
Repeated examination of Act_27:1-44 by experts has shown that, while it could not have been written by a mariner, it must have been written by some gifted man who accompanied Paul on the journey, and who had an appreciation of nature and of the incidents of a sea voyage. If, without recourse to the tradition, we were to ask which one of Paul's travelling companions was most likely to have been the author of the accounts of these journeys, the most probable answer would be, Luke, the physician. If he is, at the same time, the author of the entire work, it was his own notes, which he had written down in the form of a journal during the voyage, that he incorporated in his history. Even the best memory will not retain for decades all such details as changes in the weather and the movements of the sailors in a voyage lasting for months, and no historian would record in a large work such recollections as he might have, simply because he had not forgotten them.
My strongest impression of my father's tastes, writes Dr. Pusey's daughter, was his intense love of the sea. To him, I am sure, it spoke volumes. From my earliest childhood he used to quote the Greek expression of Æschylus, and explain to us children what it meant, “the many twinkling smile of ocean”; and I am sure that it was true to him that-
Such signs of love old ocean gives,
We cannot choose but think it lives.
The ocean did live to him in a way I have never observed in any one else. I cannot fully express what I mean; but I used to watch his face as he gazed out at the sea, and feel that it was to him what it was not to others. He often spoke to me in after years of the waves tossing themselves in wild fury against the boundary God had set them. “Thus far and no farther shall thy proud waves go”; likening it to the impotence of human rebellion against the will of God.
He had also a love and enjoyment of beautiful scenery as God's handiwork, His finger tracing all and imparting to them their beauty.1 [Note: The Story of Dr. Pusey's Life, 339.]
4. A great deal might be said about the special professional life of Luke, the beloved physician, especially as it is linked to the life of the Apostle Paul. As he and Paul are seen travelling together over land and sea, those two figures taken together represent in a broad way the total care of man for man. Paul is distinctively a man of the soul, a man of the spiritual life. We know him only in his spiritual labours. If he turns aside to tent-making, it is not for the sake of the tents which he can make, but simply that, earning his own living, he may be in true relations to the men whose souls he wants to save. Luke, on the other hand, is physical. His care is for the body. The two together, then, as we watch their figures, climbing side by side over mountains, sleeping side by side on the decks of little Mediterranean boats, standing side by side in the midst of little groups of hard-won disciples-may we not say of them that they may be considered as recognizing and representing between them the double nature and the double need of man? Body and soul as man is, the ministry that would redeem him and relieve him must have a word to speak to, and a hand to lay upon, both soul and body. The two missionaries together make a sort of composite copy of the picture, which St. Matthew gives us of Jesus going “about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.”
At a place called Chighakor, one of the minor chiefs came to Mrs. Bishop for medicine, which she gladly gave him. Lingering in her tent, he asked her why she ministered to people unknown to her, without demanding a recompense. This was her opportunity, and she told him the story of Christ, whose anxiety for the physical well-being of the people whom He had come spiritually to save, was so great that He spent His days in going from village to village to heal their disease and rescue them even from death.1 [Note: A. M. Stoddart, The Life of Isabella Bird, 228.]
When prescribing to his patients, it was Dr. Daniel Rutherford's custom to offer up at the same time a prayer for the accompanying blessing of heaven.2 [Note: J. G. Lockhart, Life of Scott, i. 147.]
Beside the unveiled mysteries
Of life and death go stand,
With guarded lips and reverent eyes
And pure of heart and hand.
So shalt thou be with power endued
From Him who went about
The Syrian hillsides, doing good
And casting demons out.
That Good Physician liveth yet
Thy Friend and Guide to be;
The Healer by Gennesaret
Shall walk the rounds with thee.1 [Note: J. G. Whittier, “The Healer.”]
5. From the time that Luke adventured himself with Paul, through weal and woe he remained faithful. He had watched the breaking up of the little band; he had seen his leader grow prematurely old through his exacting labours; and he had guessed the issue of the impending trial before Nero. Yet until the end came he would never be absent for long from the side of the man whom he loved as his own soul. Only Luke is with me throbs the human cry of the heart that hungered for the presence of those who felt and understood; but Luke was with him in the intenser meaning of that word-with him in everything that appertained to the spread of the Redeemer's Kingdom-and for him to desert in the hour of danger not only would have been a violation of trust and honour, a transgression of the most sacred sanctions of life, but would have assumed the proportions of disloyalty to Christ.
Name not as friends the men who by you stand
In pleasant times, when peace and welfare please you;
But him indeed call friend who grasps your hand
In that dark day when want and danger seize you.
O God All-wise, who electing St. Luke to be of the number of Thy four Evangelists didst furnish him with abundance of gifts needful or expedient to so great an end, endowments natural and supernatural, human learning and superhuman wisdom, aptitude and goodwill, knowledge and illumination, intercourse with Saints and inspiration of the Holy Ghost: Grant to us, we beseech Thee, hearing ears and seeing eyes that we may profit by his writings; and following in his footsteps may pass by way of life and death into the kingdom of life everlasting.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Called to be Saints, 455.]