Saint Luke, Evangelist

Saint Luke is honoured by the Church as one of the four Evangelists, the inspired writer of the third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles. From the testimony of Holy Scripture and the constant tradition of the Church, he is known to have been a physician — Saint Paul calls him “the most dear physician” — and a faithful companion of the Apostle Paul in his labours for the Gospel. By ancient tradition he was of Antioch, a convert from among the Gentiles, and a man of learning.

The Evangelist and historian

The Gospel according to Saint Luke is marked by a particular tenderness and breadth. It opens with the events surrounding the birth of our Lord and of Saint John the Baptist, and it is to Saint Luke that we owe much of what the Church treasures concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary and the infancy of Christ — the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity at Bethlehem, the Presentation in the temple. His Gospel is rich in our Lord’s parables of mercy, in his compassion for sinners, for the poor, and for the outcast, and in the spirit of prayer and of joy; for which reasons it has long been called the Gospel of mercy.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Luke continues the sacred history, recording the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the first preaching of the Gospel, and the spread of the Church from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, with particular attention to the missionary journeys of Saint Paul, whom he accompanied. Thus the Church owes to Saint Luke a great part of her knowledge of the apostolic age. He is fittingly portrayed in Christian art under the figure of the ox, one of the four living creatures of the prophet’s vision, applied of old to the four Evangelists.

His veneration

The Scriptures themselves record little of the later life and death of Saint Luke, and the particulars handed down belong to tradition rather than to certain history; ancient witnesses speak of his continued labours for the Gospel and honour him as having served Christ faithfully to the end. The collect of his feast prays that the Lord’s holy Evangelist Luke may intercede for us, who bore in his body, for the honour of the Lord’s name, the perpetual mortification of the Cross.

His feast is kept on the eighteenth of October. In Saint Luke the Church honours an Evangelist whose pen, guided by the Holy Spirit, has given to all generations the good news of the Saviour’s mercy and the record of the Church’s beginnings, and who teaches the faithful, by his example, to follow Christ in the way of the Cross.

Patronage

He is venerated as one of the four Evangelists and is honoured as a patron of physicians and surgeons, of artists and painters, and of those who labour in the proclamation of the Gospel.