Have you ever had to sell an idea or a concept or a belief? Have you ever had to sell something intangible, something you couldn’t see, touch, or taste? And maybe it was an idea that was really rather strange; one that most people would find really hard to believe. So, before you actually got someone to believe in the idea, you first have to somehow convince them that the idea is even possible.
What if you weren’t trying to sell this idea because it was a part of your job or even something you were being paid to sell? What if you were trying to sell this idea because God had appeared to you and told you to sell it? What if you woke up in the middle of the night, because God was standing at the foot of your bed tugging on your toe? You woke up, and God looked at you and said, “I want you to convince everyone that this idea is true! In fact, I’m making it your responsibility to sell it to them.” You would have no choice.
You get the idea. Have you ever really needed to convince someone of something that was really difficult to convince them of? That is the problem the guy is faced with in the passage from Luke today. The writer of Luke’s gospel was faced with a huge challenge as he wrote his version of the story of Jesus.
God always provided guidance and direction for those individuals who were selected to do important things. Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon; there is a long list of people who had God’s guidance as they did their part in the history of our faith. However, it is also important to remember that for each one of those people, they still ended up having to do a lot of the hard work themselves. God certainly provided direction, but the people still invested their blood, sweat, and tears as they tried to understand just how to get the job done. Just because God provides guidance and direction, it does not mean that we get to sit back and watch things happen all on their own. Our writer certainly had direction from God but that did not mean he got to sit back and watch the words write themselves.
I can see Luke sitting at his desk, forehead leaning on his hand, staring at the piece of parchment trying to figure out how to say what he needed to say to sell the idea he had to sell. Maybe he had been there a while. There was a pile of crumpled-up parchment pages scattered on the floor. Anyone who has written something difficult knows the experience he was having sitting there.
But Luke had an advantage that many writers do not have. Someone had already taken a shot at writing the story he had to write, trying to sell the same idea he had to sell. He actually had Mark’s copy of the story there on the desk with him, and he copied pieces from it to help with his own version of the story. At that time, copying from another writer was not seen as a bad thing but was a way to use the earlier writer’s thoughts to help make your own point. Mark had written his version for a very different audience than the one for whom Luke was writing. Mark wrote in the simple version of Greek used by the common people, since those were the people to whom he was trying to talk. Luke, however, was trying to tell the story to a different type of reader. That was the main problem he was having. His audience was a tough one.
While Mark wrote to the common folks, Luke had the task of telling his version of the story to the upper-crust folks of the cities of Antioch and Rome. These were not only more educated people, who asked lots of questions the common folks just didn’t care about. Luke was writing to people who were already very religious, and who were already people of faith in their own way. While Mark’s crowd might be impressed with the basic stories, Luke’s audience was not. Miracles? Yeah, our gods do that. Life after death? Sure, we got that. No big deal.
The early disciples saw the resurrection as one of the most powerful pieces of their story, and as the early church grew, the resurrection was a central message. But it was not a new idea in either Antioch or Rome. The idea of life after death was commonplace in most religions, and there was quite a variety of different approaches to the idea. As these folks read Mark’s story of the resurrection of Jesus, their response was, “Yeah, okay. That’s kind of like Uncle Fred, when his spirit came back at the temple of Zeus.” The idea of returning spirits was commonplace, and there was a very detailed list of the various types of life-after-death experiences that took place. There were spirits, which were sometimes only voices or faint visions of the person. There were ghosts, which looked real enough to be the person, but if you tried to touch them your hand would pass right through them. They did not have any real substance. There were several other categories, but the one primary rule that applied to them all was that they were not real and they did not eat. Think about it. If they had no real substance, where would the food go after they ate it? The fact that Jesus came back to life was just fine with these folks but there was no reason whatsoever to think he was any different than Uncle Fred, and certainly no reason to convert to some new religion based on that story alone.
Luke sat there with all of this running through his mind. Then it struck him and he began to write. He began the story innocently enough, simply telling one of the other stories that Mark chose not to tell.
It was Sunday afternoon, the same day that Mary and others found the tomb was empty. Two of the disciples had made the seven-mile walk to Emmaus. Luke doesn’t tell us who they were or why they went to the little town of Emmaus because that’s not why he was telling the story; it just was not important to him. While the two were walking, they ran into a stranger on the road and were surprised to find that he had not heard anything about what had happened earlier that morning at the tomb. They were even more surprised when they found out later that this stranger was actually Jesus, giving them the same greeting he would give the others in that closed room later on. Luke was sparse on some details, again because this is not the reason he was telling the story. We’re still just reading the prologue here.
After returning from Emmaus, the two disciples were with some of the others, telling them about the experience they just had with the stranger, who turned out to be Jesus. We were told they still weren’t really convinced, but before we have time to think much more about that, Luke tells us that Jesus appeared again, right in the middle of their storytelling. This was where Luke began to make his point.
Jesus greeted them as he did in other appearances and tried to calm their startled nerves. Luke shares the part of the story that Mark omitted, which was going to change the entire story for his audience.
After the greeting, Jesus realized they thought they were seeing a ghost. So he said, “Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (v. 39). Luke’s readers pause at this point and take notice.
Jesus then said, “Have you anything here to eat?” (v. 41). They handed him a piece of broiled fish. He ate it.
Jesus then went on to teach the disciples as he did each time he appeared to them, and said some things that were important. However, Luke’s readers will have to come back and read those things later, because at this point they are stumped: “He ate the fish? How did he eat the fish?”
That was why Luke wrote his gospel. It was simply one, long fish tale. All of the rest is important, yes. Even here at this point, Jesus tells the disciples that his death was for a purpose. He says that repentance and forgiveness are available for everyone and they are witnesses to it all. Because of that, they have a responsibility to share the story.
Does it sound silly to say that the main reason Luke wrote his gospel was because ghosts can’t eat fish? Yes, perhaps it does today. But as Luke wrote it, he was simply trying to figure out how to tell the story in a way that made the most sense to the people he was trying to convince. He didn’t make things up. He thought about what was the most important to his audience, and he wrote the story that focused on those things.
If something as silly as “Jesus ate fish!” had the impact it did for Luke’s audience, I wonder what simple message would have the most impact on our audience today?
And I wonder if we have the courage to retell the story to speak that message?