GOSPEL READING
THE GOSPEL OF LUKE
Welcome to our reading of the Gospel of Luke.
2018-2019: THE YEAR OF LUKE.
During the Church's year 2018-2019, the Sunday Gospel will usually be taken from the Gospel of Luke. This is cycle C in the Lectionary.
Our aim therefore is to read the Gospel of Luke over the coming months. Once we have read a passage, we will then see how it is used as a Sunday Gospel.
Our poject will be to read the Gospel of Luke as his story and presentation of the good news of Jesus. Luke gives us the longest of the four Gospels. Among the four, we need to discover what is the distinctive message of this, which is traditionally known as the third Gospel.
The Gospel of Luke is the only Gospel which has a sequel, the Acts of the Apostles. Together, Luke and Acts are about a quarter of the New Testament in length. We will look at the two togther as part of our orientation and preparation for our reading.
Approach
My approach in this Gospel Reading project to introduce a reading of each passage and suggest questions for you to consider during your reading. I will seek to give you possible avenues of exploration. I then ask you to go to another page where I give you a detailed reply, my response. If you have found something different, that may not necessarily be wrong.
It will be as well to make more time available during the first few weeks of reading when there will be more background to cover. After a while, an hour each week ought to be sufficent time.
Always of course have your Bible with you. Part of our reading will aim to help us to get used to thumbing through the Bible and getting to know your way around. The Bible itself is often the best interpreter of the Bible.
Whilst one Bible must always be your primary Bible, it can be very useful to look at others and compare translations. All translations have their strengths and their weaknesses. I will therefore be referring to the original Greek at times.
The Programme
Our first step must be an Orientation, an overview of the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. There are many signs that the evangelist planned his two part story carefully. A sound reading needs to be aware of and fit into Luke's framework. To some extent, most of us are already familiar (or think we are familiar) with the Gospel. A first time reading would be a very different experience of the Gospel. We must try to recreate this as far as possible and to read carefully and be open in our expectations.
Our reading will unfold from chapter 1 right through to chapter 24. Whilst the chapters will be the best framework for our reading, we will be finding that chapter divisions are not always well placed. They were set up many centuries after the Gospel was written by Stpehen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury around 1220.
It is of course possible to read separately a passage which is of particular concern, the Gospel for a particular Sunday for example. At all times though we need to keep in mind the wider context of the reading.
Navigation
Navigation on this site will be somewhat restricted: I would like you to keep to the task in hand and encourage to do as much as possible for yourselves before looking at my response.
Navigation is primarily vertical, though the site is not very deep. If you wish to move elsewhere in the site, the route is to go up as far up as necessary and then come back down again. All pages have a link to the Home Page and to the opening page of the Gospel being read. Response pages will only return you to the page from which you came.