Good News from an Unlikely Source

Read Luke 1 for background to this post.

The Bible’s Good News booklets (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) begin obscurely in a strange character, John the Baptist. It’s not immediately clear how this is good news for us. After Luke introduces his topic, he launches into the story of John’s birth. So how does this relate to good news?

While it’s not readily apparent to modern readers why Luke starts here, it’s not difficult to understand if we know just three simple pieces of information:

1) At Israel’s conception in Genesis 12:1-3, God promises their ancestors Abraham and Sarah that his descendants will become a great nation that will be a blessing to the whole world—All the families on earth will be blessed through you. That’s Israel’s purpose. The Bible’s essential message is that the world’s hope is found in the blessing Israel will give the nations.

2) The second bit of helpful information is to see that John’s parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, represent Israel at its best. Luke says about this old couple, [They] were righteous in God’s eyes, careful to obey all of the Lord’s commandments and regulations. That didn’t mean they were perfect, but in this human world they were as good as you get. They encapsulated what God wanted to see in the people of Israel.

3) But Luke also wants us to see that Israel, pictured through this couple, couldn't produce the blessing for the world. Luke says, They had no children because Elizabeth was unable to conceive, and they were both very old. 

It had been nearly 2000 years since Abraham’s and Sarah’s similar story. They were infertile and it took God’s intervention to produce a promised child in their old age. Now again he intervened in Zechariah’s and Elizabeth’s infertility. For after all these centuries the world was in just as sad a shape as ever. It was as if the promised nation Israel was barren—not able to give birth to the promise. Indeed, after all this time, the great European world power, Rome, occupied the land of Israel. Rome proclaimed itself as the good news for the world.

One year Zechariah was chosen to perform the annual priestly duty of burning incense in the most holy place of the temple, representing Israel’s prayers. The prayers at this annual event were for God to send the great promised Messiah who would save Israel—fulfilling the promise to Abraham. In the middle of this priestly task he had an incredible vision of an angel telling him he and Elizabeth would have a son who would prepare the people for the coming of the Lord. 

Even with that incredible experience he couldn’t believe such an impossibility, and was rendered speechless. When he ventured back outside to the waiting crowd, he couldn’t pronounce the priestly blessing! This pictured Israel’s incapability of blessing the world.

Now we are another 2000 years down the road. Look at our world. We look to political leaders for hope—but is there really hope? I have witnessed enough American elections to see the futility in expecting much hope. If it’s not corruption in our own government, it’s in the hopelessness of foreign affairs, poverty, violence, disease, climate change.

The good news booklets from the Bible speak of a different kind of hope that transcends world affairs as they stand today. Once upon a time, that hope took the world by a storm, but over time the church turned and twisted the message into an entity that copied the political establishment. It began to serve itself instead of the world and ignored the kinds of problems it was best positioned to address: poverty, hopelessness, injustice, prejudice, discrimination, inequity. No wonder why the church lost its influence in the western world. But the message of good news transcends church bureaucracy and corruption.

Today the church needs to shed itself of ineffectual, 'barren' self talk, self-righteousness, judgment, bureaucracy, corruption, and return to the simple Good News. For there aren’t many in our western hemisphere who see good news in the church. 

Especially all those people who have become disaffected from the church over the years—don’t give up on Jesus. He far transcends your experience of ‘church’. He far transcends the church. Go back and read these first century Good News tracts, and see what inspired a worldwide movement. 

Good News

Everyone likes good news! Good news gives us hope, and hope keeps us going, even in dark days. Good news ranges from something as insignificant as someone bringing a hot toddy when you’re working outside on a freezing cold day, to the phone call that says, “We’re having a baby!”

Luke wrote a booklet that came to be known as The Gospel of Luke. The word Gospel comes from the old English meaning Good News. Why did Luke and others write these good news booklets? They were inspired by the teachings of Jesus, and then most profoundly affected by his death and resurrection.

After a generation of listening to the gripping stories from eyewitnesses, the old ones began to die off. They felt an urgency to write down their testimony. Luke was a younger companion of the great Apostle Paul. After Paul was imprisoned in Rome, Luke wrote down the words he had often heard and which he had carefully researched for himself. He began this way:

Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught (Luke 1:1–4; New Living Translation).

Was Luke just regurgitating a line of propaganda? He claims not. He wants to present the facts, not just preferred beliefs. If there were already lots of accounts, why did he think he had to repeat what was already written? I can only conclude that he wanted to get out only what was true, rather than hearsay or fanciful tales. He wasn’t content to just repeat stories—apparently even if they came right from the great Apostle Paul told. He carefully investigated everything. He wanted to write a trustworthy account that people could rely on.

Who was Theophilus? We don’t know. Since Luke’s second volume ends with Paul imprisoned in Rome, we can guess that perhaps Theophilus was a Roman interested in the teachings these new Christians were buzzing about.

But the reality of it today is that we are invited to identify with “Theophilus”—to seek the truth behind the buzz.