Today, two weeks to the hour or so after a scalpel began some major work on my midsection, I settled into a warm bath for a soak. I had with me Joel Green’s commentary on Luke. It’s large and heavy for bathtub reading (xxcii + 928 pp., 1997, NICNT), but I was careful.
A few days ago I was reading Luke and getting frustrated with it seeming haphazard and pointless in its presentation of Jesus’s teachings and actions (really, some would remind me, because it’s not Matthew). So I went to the attic closet for Green’s commentary, figuring he’d show me the error of my thinking.
There’s a few reasons for picking Green’s beyond it being a book I already have in the house (but have probably never opened before):
1. Joel and I have known each other for quite a while, and I’ve learned a lot from him in reading and conversation.
2. Joel’s commentary on 1 Peter (in the 2 Horizons series) impressed me years ago as how commentaries ought to be written.
3. I follow along some of the same paths of interpretation as Joel. This was confirmed in the first paragraph (p. 1) of the Luke commentary, where he says that his commentary “pursues a line of study to which I [Joel] have referred elsewhere as ‘discourse analysis’—correlating culture-critical and narratological concerns.” I don’t think “culture-critical” means here what it means to some other folks; perhaps a “socio-” is needed somewhere in Green’s sentence. At any rate, readers of The One Story can have no doubt about the narratological and social-class focuses of my Bible reading.
4. Joel shares his name with another Dr. Joel Green, a surgeon who has worked on me a couple times, though not the most recent time. The surgeon Joel Green has, among his other skills, a delightful aptitude for dry humor.
I’ve had some increased post-surgical pain today, enough to bring a Stoic partway back to earth, so I brought that along with Joel’s commentary into the bath. Joel makes a plea that we not fragment Luke’s narrative or separate it from its aims (p. 11). Therein he speaks of Luke “giv[ing] expression to an eschatological vision currently manifesting itself in the world wherein God ‘has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly’ (1:52)”; “it is not too much to say that the Lukan narrative is an invitation to embrace an alternative worldview and to live as if the reign of God had already revolutionized this age.” I have wondered how Mary handled the pains and dangers she went through (including the sword predicted in Luke 2:35) after her enthusiastic outburst of revolutionary realized eschatology in Luke 1, and I wonder about how I handle the inconveniences and pains in my life in the same eschatological light.
In case anyone reading this knows me but isn’t in the loop, I had surgery on my pancreas back in ’018 (see “uh-oh; capacity”) and a hernia fix a couple months ago, both by one of those Joel Greens. More recently, a Whipple procedure (look it up for gory details), not through a little hole with a camera as they do such things now but with me fileted out with a 12½-inch incision because of the proximity of major blood vessels. This in the continuing effort to fight off cancer. I am currently, by the way, about 13 inches wide. Do the math.
The One Story 