Luke 1:1–4

When I teach a seminary polity course or lead training sessions for new church officers, I often make reference to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s “Great Ends of the Church,” contained in the Book of Order. There are six “Great Ends,” adapted from a predecessor Presbyterian denomination more than a century ago. ¹ For my students, things go very well until we reach “Great End” Number Four: “the preservation of the truth.” An inevitable pushback follows.

In our postmodern church, situated in our postmodern world, people have trouble assigning the label “truth.” Our culture insists that everything is relative. We are skeptical of anyone claiming the “truth,” and sometimes rightly so. Whose truth? Who decides? Can there be more than one “truth”? (“Preserving” truth is another matter altogether. How can anything be preserved in such a fluid, evolving context?)

The writer of Luke-Acts had no such problem. In fact, we receive a rare exegetical and homiletical gift in Luke 1:1–4 when the agenda of this biblical writer is laid out clearly for Theophilus, the benefactor. The writer of Luke (who is not identified by name, but whom the church knows as “Luke”) tells Theophilus that many people have been writing Gospel accounts. Luke’s task is straightforward: to provide an orderly account and to instruct Theophilus in the truth: “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you . . . so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

The Greek word that Luke uses here, asphaleian, translated “truth” in the NRSV, means “surety,” “certainty,” or “firmness.” The Gospels use other Greek words to signify “truth,” but the point here is the author’s certainty. The noun form of asphaleian comes into English as “asphalt,” a sturdy, paved roadway. This account seeks to establish its firm authority. Theophilus (and we) should pay attention to this sure account.

Our problem, as twenty-first-century followers of Christ in a doubt-riddled postmodern world, is also an opportunity. We must consider “truth” in the face of other Gospel accounts that offer different perspectives. We must consider “truth” in the context of growing sensitivity and awareness of other religions around the globe and in the U.S.A. We must also consider “truth” among the growing ranks of the “nones,” people who do not attach belief to particular ecclesial practices.

Preachers must preach about truth in ways that are faithful, compelling, and authentic in the face of evolving homiletical expectations that require less expository and more narrative and experiential examples. Preachers must deliver the truth to listeners who have a wide spectrum of experiences and expectations. It is not always clear how to worship “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). At this point, Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), resonates deeply and profoundly on many levels.

These are big theological and homiletical opportunities, yet those of us who preach regularly rarely have the time to step back and contemplate them. Luke 1:1–4 invites us into such a moment, when we not only engage the text but ponder its author’s intent and vision and apply them for our time. As preachers, that is what we do. We pray for illumination, and then we pay rigorous attention to the Gospel writer’s context and to what the Gospel author writes. If this is the truth we are to encounter, let’s encounter it and see where it takes us. We engage in the grand arc of the narrative—from birth to life to death to new life. We are invited to pay attention to the life and ministry of Jesus: what he said, what he did, whom he healed, with whom he ate. That is all truth. But there is more. In the writer’s consciousness, the full arc of the narrative ends not with Easter, but with the establishment of the church and its mission begun in Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts, and continuing today.

A dialogue between text and context, therefore, would need to connect multiple contexts, those of the original writer and ours. That dialogue would then seek to understand how each context engaged the concept of truth. That is to say, why is this biblical account being shared? Already for the first-century Christian community, various accounts of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection existed. Was the author of Luke-Acts seeking to establish a factual narrative, or, rather, was the writer inviting Theophilus into a deeper encounter with Jesus in order to deepen his faith? Who was Luke’s audience beyond Theophilus? How did Luke’s particular Christology, considered extensively in commentary after commentary, influence his account?

We ask the same questions, do we not? Do we engage Scripture for a historical account, or do we engage it for a deeper encounter with Jesus? Are those aims mutually exclusive? Is that even the right question to ask in our postmodern environment? Even more perplexing, what truth do our hearers seek as they settle into their pews on a Sunday morning or live-stream a sermon, or read a version online?

These theological questions are not only for preachers but for the entire Christian community. Yet it falls to the preacher’s task to ask these questions in particular ways. Luke 1:1–4 presents the questions more transparently than many biblical texts, but each sermon is an opportunity to invite the listener into a conversation between “the truth” and how it matters.

R. Alan Culpepper writes that the prologue to Luke is “both carefully worded and deliberately vague, simultaneously clarifying and obscuring.” ² This paradox of revealing and hiding elevates the opportunity for a fruitful dialogue between a multitude of contexts, then and now. Culpepper writes that for Luke, “truth” indicates “‘security,’ ‘safety,’ ‘assurance,’ or ‘certainty.’” ³ All of those understandings bring readers and hearers closer to Luke’s narrative vision. The Gospel tells us who Jesus is and what we are to know about him. This is the gospel task: “to know Christ and to make him known.”

Satirist and talk-show host Stephen Colbert has introduced a new term to our cultural lexicon. Colbert spoke of “truthiness,” a quality of knowing the truth intuitively, “from the gut,” to believe in something because it “feels right.” ⁴ Colbert was lampooning an American political situation that often appeals more to the emotions than rationality, yet he was onto something.

We are to love God with heart and soul and mind (Deut 6:5; Luke 10:27), so that we engage truth with our whole being, and not simply intellectually. Some of our creeds encourage us to “believe” while others utilize the term “trust.” William Sloane Coffin writes that “Credo—I believe—best translates ‘I have given my heart to.’” ⁵ This heart-felt belief is more than Colbert’s “truthiness,” of course, but it is also more than a recitation of events and locations.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his listeners “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). Luke’s prologue is an invitation for hearers of the word, and its interpreters, to know that truth. What we do with the prologue, and the narrative that follows, will be a product of context and experience and timing. And it will also be a product of the work of the Holy Spirit guiding both preacher and listener. Luke 1:1–4 provides a theological opportunity to reset the whole enterprise, to remind those who preach and those who listen what this message is all about in the first place.

It would be easy at this point to make another cultural reference to Jack Nicholson’s line “You can’t handle the truth!” from the film “A Few Good Men.” When it seems as if we cannot handle the truth, we trust in the Holy Spirit to help us experience the truth in the written words of Scripture and in the Word incarnate, the one who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).