We’re in Year C of the liturgical cycle, and that means the Gospel of Luke is the one we’ll hear most often at Sunday Masses this year.
Luke’s vision of Jesus is deeply attuned to God’s compassion, justice and concern for those most impoverished and marginalized, offering a radical invitation to all to enter into the kingdom of God. This Gospel invites us to embrace a community where sinners are welcomed, outsiders brought in and the lost are found. It challenges us Christians not just to listen but to respond—moving from passive reading to active discipleship.
For “Preach: The Catholic Homilies Podcast,” I spoke with Luke Timothy Johnson, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Christian Origins at Emory University, to explore what makes Luke’s Gospel distinctive. Dr. Johnson, a prolific biblical scholar, is the author of over 30 books, including his commentaries on The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles in the Sacra Pagina series. He is also the author of Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church and a leading critic of the Jesus Seminar and similar historical reconstructions. His work challenges traditional research on the historical Jesus, emphasizing that Christian faith is rooted not in a reconstructed past, but in the ongoing presence of the risen Christ within the community.
In the first part of our conversation, we focus on the Lenten lectionary cycle for Year C, walking through it week by week to help preachers prepare their homilies and guide everyone in the pews into a deeper engagement with this season of renewal. (Parishes following the scrutinies will have different readings.)
In the next part of my conversation with Dr. Johnson—which we will release in a few days—he offers deeper insight into Luke’s Gospel and what makes it so distinctive.
(This transcript has been edited for clarity.)
First Sunday of Lent: The temptation of Jesus (Luke 4:1-13)
Ricardo da Silva, S.J.: At the start of his ministry, Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, goes into the desert for 40 days, where he is tempted by the devil. But unlike Matthew, Luke places the final temptation in Jerusalem. Is there significance to this ordering? How should we understand the temptation account in Luke?
Luke Timothy Johnson: With Luke’s temptation account, again, context is all important. We need to begin with the Baptism, where Jesus is at prayer when the Holy Spirit descends upon him, bodily, and God declares that he is God’s beloved Son. Immediately after that, Luke has, distinctively, the genealogy of Jesus, which begins with Adam as the Son of God and concludes with Jesus as the Son of God. So, at the Baptism, he is the Son of God, and in the genealogy, he’s the Son of God. Then, Luke has him led by the Spirit to be tested in the wilderness. He faces these three challenges, which begin, “If you are really the Son of God.” So, that theme of being God’s child—what does it mean to be God’s child? And what are the options for being God’s child? The role of the devil here is to test Jesus with the kinds of options: turn these stones into bread, and Jesus responds from Scripture, right? “Not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This is the prophet speaking. The prophet lives by the word of God.
The second temptation, which, as you point out in Matthew, is the third, the devil brings Jesus up and shows him all the empires of the world. He says, “I’ll give you these because they’ve been given to me. All you have to do is make a deal. You have to compromise. You have to bow down before me.” And Jesus says, “You can only bow down before God.”
The third temptation is placed by Luke in Jerusalem on the pinnacle of the temple. And people have puzzled: Why does he do that? Partly because of the importance of the movement toward Jerusalem in his narrative as a whole. For Luke, Jerusalem is the nodal point of his whole narrative. Jerusalem is what the Gospel goes to, and Jerusalem is what Acts goes out from and keeps returning to. So, partly, I think it’s just his geographical fascination.
More importantly for the preacher is this: in Luke’s account, the conclusion is, “You shall not test the Lord your God.” And so, what we have at the end is Jesus showing himself to resist the forms of power that lead to pleasure, to dominance over others, to manipulating the divine, and to be, as Luke shows him throughout the entire Gospel, the obedient Son of God.
A final little note in Luke’s account: Luke only says the devil left him for a time. There is no more combat with Satan until the passion account, when Satan enters into the heart of Judas. It shows us the care with which Luke constructs his narrative.
I would say this for the preacher: Superficially, people somehow think that if they are God’s child, then everything should be fine from that point on. I think what the temptation account tells us is that faith does not remove difficulties. Faith creates difficulties, and when you commit yourself to God as God’s child, the testing just begins. The real difficulties of discipleship emerge over time.
Luke’s great journey: Jesus goes to Jerusalem
We’re going to be with Luke’s Gospel as we move into that framework of the first four weeks of Lent. Could you help us situate where we’re going?
The next three weeks focus on the accounts of the Transfiguration, the parables of the fig tree and the prodigal son. All three are located within Luke’s great journey from Luke 9:51 to 19 as Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. This is a distinctive part of Luke’s Gospel, not found as fully in the other Gospels. There are two important contextual points for the preacher to think about as he or she prepares these particular passages.
The first is that Luke portrays this as the journey of the prophet toward his death in Jerusalem. There’s a very strong prophetic motif running through this journey. The second point for the preacher to be aware of is that, as Jesus goes, Luke has him speaking alternately to three separate groups of people: the crowds, his disciples and his opponents. Luke carefully notes who he’s speaking to and what he’s saying. To the crowds, he issues calls to conversion and repentance—so here is the prophet calling people to repentance. To his disciples, he gives instructions on discipleship, bearing the cross, the use of possessions, prayer and perseverance; and to his opponents, he tells parables of rejection.
It’s important for the preacher to be able to locate what Jesus is saying, to whom he’s saying it and where he is on the journey as he says it.
Second Sunday of Lent: The Transfiguration of Jesus (Luke 9:28b-36)
Jesus takes Peter, James,and John up the mountain. His appearance changes as He speaks with the prophets Moses and Elijah. How can we understand this vision of the Transfiguration today?
Once more, in Luke, the context is all-important. We must go back to the pericope to understand what Luke is doing with the Transfiguration. In the first case, Jesus asks his disciples who he is. It’s another identity question, right? And Peter responds, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus then predicts his passion, death and resurrection. That is followed by the pericope in which Jesus outlines the demands of discipleship: You must take up your cross and follow Jesus. You must take up your cross every day and follow him. So here is the Messiah, who is going to suffer, asking his disciples to suffer.
Then he goes up on the mountain, and only in Luke does the evangelist give us the purpose for that trip: It is in order to pray. And he emphasizes this: While he was praying. What we have in Luke’s version of the Transfiguration is a prayer experience. And in that prayer experience, the true nature of Jesus is revealed. Homiletically, this suggests that it is in prayer that we find our own true identity. This is what the mystics experience: that utter truthfulness before God.
Jesus is revealed in splendor. But notice, glory is the conversation topic between him and Elijah and Moses. It’s his Exodus that he is about to accomplish in Jerusalem, his death and resurrection. Right in the middle of this splendid prayer experience is the foreshadowing of his death that he is going to accomplish in Jerusalem. What often happens is that people who read Scripture separate glory and suffering. Even Luke does it: The Messiah had to suffer and then enter into his glory.
But if we look more carefully at the biblical understanding of glory, glory suggests the presence and power of God. And so what Luke’s Transfiguration narrative shows us is not only the revelation of true identity in prayer but that the real glory of God will be revealed in the death of Jesus. The suffering is not simply apart from glory; suffering is the means by which the power and presence of God is at work in the world.
In Luke’s version, Peter’s wanting to build three huts is not simply an attempt to democratize Jesus and Elijah (as is clearly the point in Mark), but that he would rather create a shrine than follow Jesus on the way to his death. So, it’s an act of resistance on Peter’s part.
Third Sunday of Lent: The parable of the fig tree (Luke 13:1-9)
The call to repentance and the parable of the barren fig tree—how are we to understand this parable?
The good news is that Jesus tells a parable rather than cursing the fig tree himself. So that relieves the homiletician from having to struggle with that awkward part. Here’s why I emphasize the context of the journey and Jesus’ calling to conversion: because the pericope immediately before this one is the passage about those who were killed by Pilate and on whom the tower of Siloam fell. Jesus asks, “Were they greater sinners than you?” And he says: “You need to convert now, in effect, because this could happen at any time. Pilate could go crazy at any time. A tower can fall on you at any time.”
So the call to conversion is not chronic—it’s acute. You need to convert now. And so he tells this parable of the fig tree, which has only a very simple point: the gardener is more patient with the fig tree than the owner of the fig tree is. The owner of the fig tree is kind of an efficiency expert. It’s not yielding fruit, so cut it down. Why is it wasting space? And the gardener, who loves the fig tree, says: “Let me put a little manure around it. Let me nurture it, and then you can come back and see if it’s borne fruit.”
Luke is portraying conversion: that God gives us time for conversion, which is a very important motif in the New Testament. It’s what all of Second Peter is about—that God gives us time in order to convert. Now, why is this significant? Homiletically, if all we had to do was convert to God, we could do that instantly, like Constantine on his deathbed. But conversion, repentance, means changing our stance not only toward God, but toward the whole world, toward ourselves, toward others, toward God’s created order. This takes time, and so conversion is our one task given us by God, and it takes every minute of our life to do it.
It’s the old rabbinic saying: You have to repent the day before you die, but you may die tomorrow, so repent today.
Fourth Sunday of Lent: The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:1-3, 11-32)
On the fourth Sunday of Lent, we have another parable. This is the parable of the prodigal son. We get verses 1 to 3 and then 11 to 32; we miss a lot in between. I’m sure that’s important for us, but once you contextualize and help us homiletically, how should we think about this parable?
Jesus is on his journey. This parable is told to his opponents. It’s very important to note that the passage opens with the fact that tax collectors and sinners were eager to listen to Jesus and were gathering to him, and the Pharisees objected, saying that he eats with tax collectors and sinners. So Luke sets this up contextually with a complex situation: People who are repenting and listening to Jesus, and people who are angry and resisting because of those people who are repenting and because it is Jesus whom they are reaching toward.
Luke is distinctive in this respect. He uses his parables to advance his overall narrative. Every parable in Luke is connected to what’s happening in the larger story. And we see that example here: Jesus is being surrounded by tax collectors and sinners, and his opponents are saying, “How could this be happening?” And so he tells the story of the lost sheep, he tells the story of the lost coin—typical Lucan sort of gender equality, male figure, female figure. But then comes the story of the lost son.
There’s such a vast literature on this parable because it is far and away the most psychologically dense and intriguing of all of Jesus’ parables. It’s not only about reconciliation; it’s not only about conversion; it’s about alienation. A very useful homiletic approach is to address the issue of alienation within our lives, within our family groups, within our friendships, within our associates. What does it derive from?
In this case, it’s not the younger son who’s alienated. He and his father are getting along just fine. He takes his portion of the inheritance, goes off, wastes it, and comes to himself—which is Luke’s way of talking about conversion—recognizes his condition, says: “I’m not worthy to be my father’s son anymore. I’ll become one of his slaves.” So he returns. The father showers him with affection and with signs of celebration.
The real kicker in the story is the elder son, whom we are to see as the Pharisees. The Pharisees resent others being reconciled. The elder son is full of rage, full of envy. He approaches the house, but he won’t go in. He talks to the servants, and they tell him what’s happening. Then he rebukes his father: “You never gave me even a goat to celebrate with my friends, not with you, but with my friends, even though I’ve slaved for you.”
The parable doesn’t say that it’s the elder son giving the worst possible construction on the younger son. Instead, he says, “This son of yours,” dissociating himself from the relationship. “It’s not my brother; it’s your son.” And the father responds, “Your brother was dead and is now brought back to life, was lost and has now been found.”
So the father seeks reconciliation with both. What keeps reconciliation from happening is not the father, it’s not the younger son, it’s the rage and the envy of the older son. So within Luke’s Gospel, Luke intends for us to see this as a story that illustrates what’s happening in Jesus’ ministry.
I love that you focused on the older brother because we so often overlook his role in this parable and how important it is to the overall arc of the story. Can you think of a time when you preached on this parable that was meaningful for you?
Meaningful and difficult. We had a family gathering about 15 years ago, and among my siblings, there were some who just weren’t talking to each other—politically, religiously…. We had grown up very tight. So, I preached on this text, on how alienation can infiltrate even our assumptions about how we are a close family. Nobody commented on the sermon.
That’s often when you know you’ve hit home, quite literally.
No, it shows you that when nobody wants to listen to their youngest brother.
