Talking about the Scriptures is what I do, and it’s what I’ve done full time for almost 40 years.
So I’m often asked to cite my favorite passage in the Bible. Some of the questioners are sure — because of my bestselling study on the Book of Revelation — that I’ll answer with something mind-bending, complex, and apocalyptic.
They’re surprised when I answer: “Luke 24.”
“Which verse?” they ask.
“All of it.”
For me the last chapter of the third Gospel has become not only my favorite passage, but the lens through which I read all the rest of the Bible.
It is the authoritative account of God’s most explicit instruction about how to understand the Sacred Page. In the course of the chapter Jesus delivered the lesson to not one, but two groups.
First he spoke to two dispirited and confused disciples walking the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35). “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Thus he showed them God’s plan and how he had fulfilled all prophecy — all of what we call the Old Testament.
Next he delivered the same lesson to the apostles in Jerusalem (verses 36–45). He said: “These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.”
I have earned my doctorate and I occupy a named chair in the field of biblical theology. But if I go forward in faith I have to acknowledge that I am still a student — still among those good-willed but slow disciples Jesus speaks to in Luke 24.
When I speak before a classroom or a congregation, I’m learning as much as I’m teaching. That, too, is a lesson I’ve taken from Luke 24. Many of the disciples had spent three years in company with Jesus. They had listened attentively and with love. Yet they had often, if not always, missed the deepest and most important messages. Only in light of the grace received on Easter Sunday could they, at last, see what Jesus meant.
By that time they too could have claimed to hold impressive degrees and titles. They had often been eager for such things (see, for example, Mark 10:37). But they knew relatively little, because they knew only the promise of the Old Covenant and not its astonishing fulfillment in the New.
Not until Luke 24 did they learn that essential and necessary lesson. Not until 50 days later, on Pentecost, did they find out what to do with their newly acquired knowledge.
In spite of all the books I’ve written and read, I still sometimes find myself walking or sitting with those troubled, puzzled disciples on that first Easter Sunday. I still find myself returning to the scene, because I’ve come to believe that Jesus’ lesson that day is the interpretive key not only to “all the Scriptures,” but to all my life.
