The Spirit and the Poor

Two interlocking signatures run through the Gospel of Luke and on into the Acts: the Holy Spirit, who fills the whole narrative from the conception of Christ to Pentecost, so that Luke–Acts can fairly be called the Gospel and the Acts of the Spirit; and the poor, to whom the good news is announced and for whom the great reversal is enacted. This file sets out both themes — the Spirit-Christology that frames the Lord’s ministry and the social conscience that runs from the Nazareth manifesto through the Beatitudes and the parables of wealth — and traces their reception in the Orthodox tradition, especially in Chrysostom and Basil on almsgiving.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Evangelist of the Spirit

No Gospel speaks of the Holy Spirit so often or so structurally as Luke’s, and the theme does not stop at the Gospel’s close but carries straight into the second volume. Already in the infancy narrative the Spirit is the agent of every event: the angel tells Mary that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” so that the conception itself is the work of the Spirit (Luke 1:35); Elizabeth is “filled with the Holy Spirit” at the Visitation (Luke 1:41); Zechariah, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” prophesies the Benedictus (Luke 1:67); and Symeon, on whom “the Holy Spirit was upon him,” comes “in the Spirit” into the Temple to take the child in his arms (Luke 2:25–27). The opening chapters are governed throughout by the Spirit, who moves from one figure to the next as the divine actor behind the human voices.

The same Spirit then frames the public ministry of the Lord. At the Baptism “the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove” (Luke 3:22); Jesus, “full of the Holy Spirit,” returns from the Jordan and is led “by the Spirit” into the wilderness (Luke 4:1); and after the temptation he comes back to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14). Luke alone among the Synoptics so insistently brackets the temptation with the Spirit, presenting the whole ministry as Spirit-empowered from its first step. The point is made explicit in the programmatic sermon at Nazareth, where Jesus reads from the prophet and applies the text to himself: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18, quoting Isaiah 61:1–2, in a form following the Septuagint and conflating a clause from Isaiah 58:6). The anointing of which Isaiah speaks is, for Luke, the descent of the Spirit at the Jordan; the Christ — the Anointed One — is anointed with the Holy Spirit, and his mission is defined by that anointing (this Spirit-Christology is taken up in Christology).

Luke draws the theme to a head in a saying he gives in a form found nowhere else. Where Matthew’s parallel promises “good things” to those who ask (Matthew 7:11), Luke writes: “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). The greatest of the Father’s gifts, in the third Gospel, is the Spirit himself — which is precisely the gift that the risen Lord promises at the Gospel’s end (“I am sending the promise of my Father upon you,” Luke 24:49) and that is poured out at Pentecost in the second volume (Acts 2:1–4). The bridge is deliberate: the Spirit who conceives Christ, descends on him, and empowers his ministry is the same Spirit who, after the Ascension, falls upon the Church and drives its mission to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8; on the second volume see The Acts of the Apostles). For this reason the two-volume work has long been read as the Gospel and the Acts of the Holy Spirit, the one continuous narrative of the Spirit’s work in Christ and then in his Body.

Good News to the Poor

The Nazareth sermon that defines the Lord’s mission by the Spirit defines it equally by the poor: “he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor . . . to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18–19). This programmatic manifesto, placed by Luke at the very head of the public ministry, announces a concern that marks his Gospel off from the others and runs through it to the end. Where Matthew blesses “the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3), Luke blesses the poor without qualification — “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God . . . Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied” — and balances each beatitude with a corresponding woe: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation . . . Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry” (Luke 6:20–25). The blessing of the literally poor and the woe upon the literally rich is the Lukan form of the great reversal already sung in the Magnificat, where God “has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:53; see The Magnificat). What Mary proclaims in chapter 1, the Lord pronounces in chapter 6 and enacts through the rest of the book.

The danger of riches is then dramatized in a series of parables and sayings unique to Luke. The rich fool, whose ground brings forth plentifully and who plans only to build bigger barns, hears God call him a fool the very night his soul is required of him — “so is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21). The rich man and Lazarus shows the reversal carried beyond death: the man who “feasted sumptuously every day” while the beggar lay at his gate is in torment, and Lazarus is carried to Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:19–31). Against this danger Luke sets a positive command, also in a form sharper than the parallels: “Sell your possessions, and give to the needy” (Luke 12:33), and to the rich ruler, “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Luke 18:22). The Gospel that opens in the Temple with a poor family’s offering of two turtledoves (Luke 2:24) is throughout a Gospel of table-fellowship with the poor, the outcast, and the sinner, in which the host is told to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” who cannot repay him (Luke 14:13–14). This is not an austerity for its own sake but a release into joy and prayer: the dispossession Luke commands is the emptying that makes room for the kingdom, and it issues in the rejoicing that pervades his Gospel (the wider pattern is treated in The Gospel of Mercy).

The Orthodox Reception

The Fathers received both Lukan signatures and made them their own. The Spirit-Christology of the Nazareth manifesto — the Christ anointed with the Holy Spirit — fed the Church’s reflection on the Spirit’s procession and mission and on the unity of the Spirit’s work in Christ and in the Church (see Holy Scripture; The Church Fathers). But it is in the matter of wealth and the poor that the Fathers most evidently took Luke as their warrant. St. John Chrysostom devoted a sustained body of preaching to exactly the Lukan texts — above all the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, on which his seven sermons survive as a small treatise on wealth and poverty: the rich man, he insists, is punished not for any crime of fraud but simply for his failure to share, for “not making the poor man a partner in his goods” (Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty [Homilies on Lazarus] 2; trans. Catharine P. Roth, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984). For Chrysostom the property of the rich is held in trust for the poor, and to fail to give alms is a kind of robbery — a reading drawn straight from the Lukan parable and pressed home on the wealthy congregations of Antioch and Constantinople (Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, homilies 1–2; trans. Roth 1984; on Chrysostom see St. John Chrysostom).

St. Basil the Great preached in the same vein on the Lukan rich fool. In the homily conventionally titled I Will Tear Down My Barns (on Luke 12:18), Basil turns the parable into an indictment of hoarding: “The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the cloak you store away belongs to the naked; . . . the silver you keep buried in the earth belongs to the needy” (Basil, I Will Tear Down My Barns / Homily on the Saying of the Gospel “I Will Pull Down My Barns”; trans. in On Social Justice, Popular Patristics Series, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009). In Basil’s hands, as in Chrysostom’s, the Lukan teaching becomes the foundation of the Church’s social conscience — the conviction that almsgiving is not optional charity but the restoration of what is owed. The third Gospel thus stands behind the whole patristic theology of mercy to the poor, just as it stands behind the liturgical and ascetic emphasis on detachment from possessions. The Evangelist of the Spirit is equally the Evangelist of the poor, and in the Orthodox reading the two belong together: it is the same Spirit, anointing the Christ to preach good news to the poor, who anoints the Church to be merciful as her Lord was merciful.

See Also

References

  • The Gospel According to Luke (Luke 1:35 the conception by the Spirit; 1:41, 67 Elizabeth and Zechariah filled with the Spirit; 2:25–27 Symeon; 3:22 the Spirit at the Baptism; 4:1, 14 “full of” and “in the power of” the Spirit; 4:18–19 the Nazareth manifesto; 6:20–26 the Beatitudes and Woes; 11:13 the Father giving the Spirit; 12:16–21 the rich fool; 12:33, 18:22 sell and give; 16:19–31 the rich man and Lazarus). Cited by chapter and verse.
  • The Book of Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1–2, with a clause from 58:6, in the Septuagint form quoted at Luke 4:18). Cited by chapter and verse, LXX behind Luke.
  • The Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1:8 the Spirit and the witness to the ends of the earth; 2:1–4 Pentecost). Cited by chapter and verse.
  • John Chrysostom. On Wealth and Poverty (the seven Homilies on Lazarus, on Luke 16:19–31). Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The rich man punished for failing to share; property held in trust for the poor.)
  • Basil of Caesarea. On Social Justice (including I Will Tear Down My Barns, on Luke 12:18, and To the Rich). Trans. C. Paul Schroeder. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. (The hoarded bread, cloak, and silver owed to the poor.)
  • Marshall, I. Howard. The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978. (The Nazareth sermon, the Beatitudes and Woes, and the Lukan theme of the poor.)