📖 New Testament Survey — Unit 4: Luke: The Compassion of the Son of Man

I. The Doctor at His Desk

Somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, in or about the year 60, a Greek-speaking physician named Luke sat down at a writing table with a stack of interview notes and began the most carefully researched book in the New Testament. He addressed it to a man named Theophilus — probably a Roman official, almost certainly a Gentile, possibly a recent convert who had heard the bones of the Christian story and wanted the full picture. Luke's opening is unique among the Gospel writers. He does not begin like John, with the eternity of the Word. He does not begin like Matthew, with the genealogy of the King. He does not begin like Mark, who starts with the Servant already on the run. Luke begins like a doctor opening a chart: "Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things which have been fulfilled among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed" (Luke 1:1–4).

Luke is the only Gentile author of any book in the New Testament. He is the doctor Paul called "Luke the beloved physician" (Colossians 4:14), the faithful traveling companion who refused to abandon Paul to the very end (2 Timothy 4:11). He had walked Roman roads, interviewed eyewitnesses, copied genealogies, and ordered every story by date and place. The result is a Gospel of meticulous beauty written by a trained scientific mind — the most polished Greek in the New Testament, the longest book in the New Testament, and the most tender. Compassion runs through every chapter like a quiet stream.

Nor did Luke lay down his pen when the Gospel was finished. He wrote a second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, addressed to the same Theophilus: "The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach" (Acts 1:1). Together, Luke and Acts form a single two-part history — the first volume telling what Jesus began to do in His earthly ministry, the second telling what He continued to do through His Church by the Spirit. The same careful doctor who interviewed the eyewitnesses of the Gospel went on to chronicle the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome. When you read Luke, remember that its sequel is already in the writer's mind.

II. The Genealogy that Goes Home to Adam

Before the genealogy, Luke gives us the songs of the nativity that no other Gospel preserves — and the first and greatest of them belongs to a teenage girl. When Mary visited her relative Elizabeth, she broke into a hymn of praise that the Church has sung ever since under its Latin name, the Magnificat: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior" (Luke 1:46–47). It is the song of a poor young woman from a despised town, exalting a God who scatters the proud and lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. The Magnificat is Luke's manifesto in miniature, sung before the Gospel has even properly begun: the compassion of the Son of Man, announced first by His mother.

Matthew traces the genealogy of Jesus back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, because Matthew is writing for Jews and wants them to see the King in their own line (Matthew 1:1–17). Luke does not stop at Abraham. He keeps going. Past Abraham, past Noah, past Methuselah and Enoch, past Seth and Cain, all the way back, until he reaches the first name in the human story: "the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). Look carefully at that final phrase. Luke is writing for Gentiles, for Greeks, for the whole human race. He wants every reader from every nation to lift his eyes from the page and see his own ancestor in the same genealogy as the Son of Man. The compassion of Luke's Jesus is not for one tribe; it is for the lost family. Matthew gives us Christ the King for the Jew, Mark gives us Christ the Servant for the Roman, John gives us Christ the God for the believer, and Luke gives us Christ the Man for everybody.

III. The Manifesto at Nazareth

The first recorded sermon of the Lord Jesus, in Luke's account, was preached in His own hometown synagogue. They handed Him the scroll of Isaiah. He found chapter 61 and read aloud, "The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD" (Luke 4:18–19). He closed the scroll. He sat down. And in the silence He said one sentence that no rabbi in Nazareth had ever dared to say: "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21).

That sermon is the manifesto of Luke's whole Gospel. Five categories of broken humanity: the poor, the brokenhearted, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. Luke is going to walk us through every one of them. A poor widow drops two mites into the temple treasury (Luke 21:1–4). A brokenhearted woman washes the Lord's feet with her tears (Luke 7:38). A demon-bound man, naked among the tombs, is set free and clothed and seated in his right mind (Luke 8:35). Blind Bartimaeus shouts above the crowd until Jesus stops (Luke 18:35–43; Mark 10:46 gives his name). An oppressed Samaritan leper, one of ten, returns to give thanks (Luke 17:11–19). The manifesto preached in Nazareth becomes the Gospel-shaped life lived in every village.

IV. The Key Verse

Pencil this one into the margin of your Bible: "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). It is the verse Luke wraps around the whole book. Read every paragraph of Luke against that verse and the picture clears. The Son of Man came to seek — He goes after; He does not wait. The Son of Man came to save — He does not merely sympathize; He reaches. And what He came to save is that which was lost — the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son, the lost tax collector named Zacchaeus up the sycamore tree in whose house the verse is first spoken (Luke 19:1–10). Luke's compassion is not a feeling. It is a search party.

V. The Heart of Luke — Chapter 15

About eight months ago I lost a pocket knife. It was no ordinary one, but the one my father had carried in his pocket for years. I searched everywhere. I asked at church. No one had seen it. Then one of my sons gave me a fine new pocket knife for my birthday, and about a week later I noticed that one was gone too. I was ashamed to tell him. I searched the car, the chairs, every pocket, in the homes of every family I had visited. At last in the home of an older couple, the wife pulled the cushions off the couch where I had sat the week before; and her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's, reached into his own pocket and held something out, saying, "I found this on the floor." It was not the new knife. It was my father's knife — the one I had lost eight months before. In looking for the one, I had found the other. Some days later I felt something heavy in my pants pocket and reached in: there was the new knife. I had searched that pocket three times in frantic looking, but I had not seen it.

Every time I tell that story I find myself in Luke 15. The Lord Jesus told three parables in a row about lost things — a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son — and the point of all three is the same: heaven does not yawn over lost things; heaven mobilizes. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine in the open country and goes after the one. The woman lights the lamp and sweeps the house and searches carefully until she finds it. The father, when the boy is still a great way off, sees him, has compassion, runs, falls on his neck, and kisses him. "Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Luke 15:10). Notice the word compassion. In Greek it is splanchnizomai — a deep-gut word, the same word that is used of the Good Samaritan when he sees the wounded man, the same word that is used of the Lord Jesus when He sees the crowds. The compassion of the Son of Man is not a tear running down a cheek; it is the running of the father, with his robe flapping behind him, toward a boy who is still smelling of pigs.

VI. The Compassion that Crosses Lines

Luke records more parables of crossing lines than any other Gospel. A Samaritan stops on the Jericho road where a priest and a Levite had passed by, and binds up the wounds of a man whom every prejudice would have made his enemy (Luke 10:25–37). A Roman centurion sends word that he does not deserve to have Jesus enter under his roof, and Jesus marvels at the faith and says, "I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel" (Luke 7:9). A sinful woman crashes a Pharisee's dinner party and weeps over Jesus' feet, and the Lord defends her: "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much" (Luke 7:47). A widow of Nain is given back her only son (Luke 7:11–15). Mary Magdalene, out of whom seven demons had gone, sits at the empty tomb (Luke 24:10). Luke records more about women than any other Gospel. He records more about the poor. He records more about the despised. The compassion of the Son of Man is line-crossing compassion — over every fence the religious establishment had ever built.

VII. The Cross of Compassion

Luke records three sayings from the cross that no other Gospel preserves. The first is a prayer for the soldiers driving the nails: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do" (Luke 23:34). The second is a promise to a dying thief: "Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). The third is a final committing of His Spirit: "Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit" (Luke 23:46). Mark and Matthew let us hear the cry of dereliction. Luke lets us hear the prayer of pardon.

Alexander H. Stephens, the wartime Vice President of the Confederacy, became Governor of Georgia near the end of his life. He was a cripple. When his physicians said he was dying, the great men of state crowded his bedroom and begged him to sign their important documents. Stephens waved them away and called for his secretary. He told him to fetch an old, faded paper out of his desk. The secretary brought it. It was the petition of a humble mother from up in the hills of Georgia, asking pardon for her son in the state penitentiary. The cabinet officials pressed Stephens to lay it aside and take up matters of state. He answered: "No. I am going to sign this. The great matters of state will take care of themselves." Propped up on his pillow, he took the yellowed paper, dipped the pen in the ink, and wrote across the petition one word: P-A-R-D-O-N-E-D. Underneath he signed his name. Then he dropped back on the pillow and died. Two thousand years before that, on a hill called Calvary, the Son of God was also dying. At His side a thief — a man unfit to live with men — cried out, "Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom." From the bruised lips of Jesus came the answer that has echoed down the corridors of the ages: "Today you will be with Me in Paradise." The man unfit to live with men was made fit to live forever with the Son of Man. That is the cross of Luke's Gospel. That is the Compassion of the Son of Man.

VIII. The Burning Hearts on the Emmaus Road

On the afternoon of resurrection Sunday, two of the Lord's disciples were walking the seven miles from Jerusalem out to a village called Emmaus, talking sadly about all that had happened. A stranger drew alongside and asked what they were discussing. They did not recognize Him. They were too sad. "Are You the only stranger in Jerusalem," they said, "and have You not known the things which happened there in these days?" "What things?" the Lord asked them. And so they unfolded the story — of Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet they had hoped would redeem Israel, who was crucified three days ago. Then, walking beside them, the risen Lord began at Moses and all the Prophets and expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. By the time they reached Emmaus, evening had come. They begged Him to stay. He went in with them, sat down at supper, took the bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to them — and they recognized Him, and He vanished. They looked at each other in the empty room and said the line that ends Luke's Gospel for me: "Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32). That is the climax of Luke. The compassion of the Son of Man does not only forgive sinners on crosses; it warms the cold hearts of disciples on roads. It comes alongside us when we cannot see Him, walks with us when we are sad, opens the Scriptures, and breaks the bread.

IX. A Word on Luke and Hebrews

Students sometimes ask whether Luke had a hand in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The honest answer begins with a confession: no one knows who wrote Hebrews. The letter is anonymous; it names no author, and the early church itself was divided over its origin. Because Hebrews is written in the most polished, literary Greek in the New Testament — the same high quality that marks Luke's own writing — a few have proposed that Luke may have composed it, or at least translated or polished it from another's thought. It is one minor proposal among several, never the settled view; others have suggested Paul, Barnabas, Apollos, or Priscilla, and the most candid scholars simply leave the question open.

For our purposes the value is not in settling an unanswerable question but in noticing what the comparison teaches. Luke wrote the finest Greek of the Gospel writers, the careful prose of a trained, educated mind; Hebrews shares that literary polish and that same deep concern with the tabernacle, the priesthood, and the fulfillment of the old covenant in Christ. Whoever held the pen, both books reward the reader who loves careful argument. We hold the authorship of Hebrews loosely, as the church always has, and we hold its message firmly: Christ is better — a better priest, a better sacrifice, a better covenant.

X. The Gospel for Our Tomorrow

Kefa Sempangi was a national pastor in Uganda during the brutal years of Idi Amin. He and his family barely escaped the country with their lives, made it eventually to Philadelphia, and were taken in by a group of American Christians. One day, in the safety of that new home, his wife said over coffee, "Tomorrow I am going to go and buy some clothes for the children." And they both burst into tears. For so many years they had lived under the constant threat of being murdered that they had not once dared, in front of each other, to use the word tomorrow. Tomorrow was a luxury for the safe. Tomorrow was an act of compassion God had given back to them.

Luke wrote his Gospel for every weeping woman in Philadelphia who needs to be told that tomorrow is once again hers in Christ. Luke wrote his Gospel for the prodigal still smelling of pigs, for the centurion at the end of his rope, for the Samaritan despised in his village, for the dying thief who had nothing left to bargain with, for the disciple who has lost his joy on the road home. "The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." Press on, my friend, into the rest of the Gospels with the same Lord who left Nazareth's synagogue and never stopped searching, who walked the Emmaus road with strangers in their sadness, and who still walks with you today. He is your Lord, and He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Amen.

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