Scot McKnight reviews Justo Gonzalez’s The Story Luke Tells: Luke’s Unique Witness to the Gospel.
Luke’s witness to the gospel isn’t just found in the Gospel that bears his name, but also in his sequel to it — the book of Acts, or the Acts of the Apostles. So Luke wrote more of our New Testament than anyone else.
So who was this Luke person? We don’t really know. He might be the same Luke who shows up elsewhere in some of Paul’s letters, once referred to as “the beloved physician.” That Luke was probably a Gentile Christian, possibly Greek. But Gonzalez suggests that Luke may also have been the “Lucius of Cyrene” mentioned in the book of Acts itself. That might mean that Luke was African and very possibly (if Simon of Cyrene and Simon Niger are, indeed, the same person) black.
In any case, here’s the key point in McKnight’s review that I want to highlight:
Now a very interesting element of Luke’s books: they don’t end. In chronology and geography, the story does not end … we are invited, in a sense, to complete the story Luke begins. What happened to Paul? We don’t know. Where did he go? We don’t know. It is an unfinished story. We are called to write the 29th chapter of Acts.
Luke’s aim, McKnight says, is “drawing us into Acts 29 to participate in God’s story.”*
Acts is not just a continuation of the story begun in Luke’s Gospel. It’s a requisite of the meaning of that Gospel, which is that this story does not end. The challenge “to write the 29th chapter of Acts” is not an invitation to end the story, but to continue it. We cannot finish it, but we can take it further. We can only follow its trajectory, ever onward, ever outward.
That’s what makes the book of Acts one of my favorite parts of the Bible. It’s got momentum and urgency. It almost reads like a race, with Jesus’ followers rushing out into the world like Phileas Fogg, trying to go everywhere and to everyone to include them all in the ever-expanding, accelerating, inexorable spread of Pentecost.
That is the trajectory of the book of Acts, a continuation of the trajectory of the Gospel of Luke and of the rest of the Gospels. That trajectory is the gospel. We can join in and write another chapter, run another leg of the race. And we can carry the story further along, but we cannot ever expect to finish it.
We cannot know what a story means until we know how that story ends. This story does not end. That is what this story means.
So the closest thing I can imagine to a conclusion to the story of Luke-Acts would be something like this, from Tony Kushner:
The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.
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* This comes with a delightfully provocative technical glitch. McKnight’s blog is set up to turn Bible references into hyperlinks. Point your cursor at those chapter-and-verse references and the text of the verse appears in a little pop-up screen. The software recognizes “Acts 29” as a Bible reference, but the little pop-up reads: “Whoops. The passage you were looking for was not found.” Simple software error? Or is that a prophetic indictment of our failure to accept Luke’s invitation to continue this story?
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