Luke

“The Wise Thief didst Thou make worthy of Paradise, in a single moment, O Lord. By the wood of thy Cross, illumine me as well, and save me.”

In Luke’s story of Jesus’s pretrial detention, we see Jesus as the Lamb of God who has taken upon himself the sins of the world – our weakness of Peter, our violent depravity of the soldiers, and our perversion of justice of the Council.

In this last teaching, he does not give his disciples a list of theological principles to memorize, but he gives them an action to follow and a meal to share. Following after the teaching on the Apocalypse, the Last Supper is the dawn of the New Age.

The heart of the Little Apocalypse speaks to our interior preparation, regardless of the turmoil we see surrounding us in the world and despite even the threats of violence and persecution and natural disaster.

There are four questions and one parable that give us a preview of the remainder of the Gospel and of Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Exaltation.

Each of these three parables has the same motif – something is lost, there is a search, the lost is found, the lost is restored, and there is a celebration. The protagonist in each parable is not the lost one but the finder.