Today I was speaking at Hathern Baptist Church on Acts 1:1-11, the start of Luke’s second contribution to the New Testament. This portion doesn’t take the story any further forward than the end of of Luke 24 but it does give some more details. He is writing to the same person (Theophilus) but a little later, so it makes sense to link back to the previous work. In some ways you could see the first few verses as recapitulating the entire gospel, reminding us of both its beginning and end.

I’d started my talk by sharing some reminiscences of my journey down the Camino de Santiago, a 100 mile pilgrimage walk Jane and I did in 2005. I kept it brief but one of the memories I shared was of finding this old, rugged cross on the hill above our starting point, the village of O Cebreiro. However, what I kept back until later in the talk was that this particular photo wasn’t taken on that journey but when I returned the following year to repeat the walk with Magnus.

That was my illustration of how it can be a benefit to revisit things – you might pick up something you missed the first time around. The same, I argued, is true with the Bible. Even through we are now in the second part of our “Luke-Acts” series, there is value in keeping a finger back in Luke’s gospel. For example, since preaching on the parable of “The Good Samaritan” at HBC last month (Luke 10), I happened to read Luke 9 and spotted that Jesus and his followers were denied hospitality by a Samaritan village.

The fact that Jesus picked a Samaritan as the hero of his story not long after adds an extra resonance beyond the normal observation that the person he was speaking to (and probably a good number of Judean Jews of the time) would have found the idea shocking. Jesus had himself been treated in a way that would have reinforced those stereotypes but chose to depict that group in a way that cut against that prejudice. That’s an example of why Jesus is a leader worth following and why I find it so wonderful that the Acts passage tells us that the same Jesus is coming back again.