Luke the Evangelist

Saint Luke the Evangelist

Feast 18 October

Profile

Our saint for today was born to pagan Greek parents in Antioch, but became one of the earliest converts to “The Way”. He was a Physician, and probably traveled as a ship’s doctor.

Legend has that he was also a painter who may have done portraits of Jesus and Mary, but none have ever been correctly or definitively attributed to him; this story led to his patronage of artists.

He met Saint Paul the Apostle at Troas, and evangelized Greece and Rome with him, being there for the shipwreck and other perils of the voyage to Rome, and stayed in Rome for Paul’s two years in prison.

He wrote the Gospel According to Luke, much of which was based on the teachings and writings of Paul, interviews with early Christians, the Gospel of Mark and his own experiences. Some scholars, including Scot Hahn, think he actually interviewed the Blessed Mother to get some of her input into the Gospel. The connection probably went from him traveling with the other evangelist, Mark. Mark also traveled with Paul for a while but they parted sort of unpleasantly and later, reconciled. Mark was also a disciple of Peter. Peter had ongoing communication with his fellow apostle John, who lived with the Blessed Mother until her Assumption. This may be why the most detailed account of the childhood of Jesus is recounted in Luke’s Gospel.

Luke wrote a second volume to his Gospel; a history of the early Church, the Acts of the Apostles. Some passages in Acts are written in the first person, i.e. Luke describing what happened to him. As we know the latter half of Acts focuses almost exclusively on Paul’s work, maybe giving us a skewed view of the early church.

Luke was a gentile, the only gentile author of any of the Gospels. His Gospel is also the only one that was originally written as opposed to being passed on orally. It is written in an educated form of Greek. It the book of Revelation the evangelist is represented an Ox.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac says that after St. Luke’s feast day there is generally a spurt of mild weather called St. Luke’s Little Summer. In olden days, St. Luke’s Day did not receive as much attention in the secular world as St. John’s Day (June 24) and Michaelmas (September 29), so to keep from being forgotten, St. Luke presented us with some golden days to cherish before the coming of winter — or so the story goes. This is different than Indian Summer which occurs around the feast of St. Martin of Tours (11 Nov), correct people if they mistake these two spurts of mild weather…it is one of the seven spiritual works of mercy; educate the ignorant.

Luke died around the year 74, somewhere in Greece some stories say he was martyred, others that he died of natural causes, his relics are in Padua, Italy.

Name Meaning
• bringer of light (= luke)

Patronage
• artists
• bachelors
• bookbinders
• brewers
• butchers
• doctors
• glass makers
• glassworkers
• gold workers
• goldsmiths
• lacemakers
• lace workers
• notaries
• painters
• physicians
• sculptors
• stained glass workers
• surgeons
• unmarried men

Representation
• brush (refers to the tradition that he was a painter)
• man accompanied by a winged ox
• man painting an icon of Blessed Virgin Mary
• ox