Lecture 25: The Spirit, the Lord, and the Cross in Luke and Acts

The lecture, section by section

1. Full of the Spirit, in the power of the Spirit

   All the Synoptics say Jesus was anointed by the Spirit at his baptism, anointed as king, for he had done no miracles in the years before; his ministry begins there. But Luke has his own accents: only Luke tells us Jesus was full of the Spirit, and only Luke that he returned from the temptation in the power of the Spirit. In the Nazareth synagogue Jesus reads his own commission: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he has anointed me. Behind it stands Isaiah 11, the shoot from the stump of Jesse on whom the Spirit rests, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge and the fear of the LORD. Jesus is the Spirit-anointed Messiah, the Spirit-anointed servant.

2. When the Spirit comes, the kingdom comes

   For Luke the Spirit is not merely a private and individual gift, though he is that; the Spirit is bringing in the kingdom. Isaiah had said everything lies waste until the Spirit is poured out from on high, and then the desert becomes an orchard and justice, righteousness, peace, and quiet confidence follow, when the king reigns, when your eyes see the king in his beauty. When the King comes, the kingdom comes; when the Spirit comes, the kingdom comes; the two arrivals are one.

3. The mother of my Lord

   Jesus' lordship is emphasized especially after the resurrection, yet Luke plants it early: Elizabeth greets Mary, amazingly, as the mother of my Lord, and the angel announces Christ the Lord at his birth. The great catch of fish in Luke 5 reads like a theophany: Peter, who knew when fish could and could not be caught, falls at Jesus' knees crying, I am a sinful man, O Lord, Isaiah 6 all over again, sensing more than he yet understood. Then Acts 2:36: God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. That is not adoptionism, as if Jesus only became Lord at Easter; it means God installed him, enthroned him at his right hand. What Jesus is doing right now is the Davidic covenant fulfilled, already though not yet consummated: the exalted Lord reigning, Lord of all, as Peter tells Cornelius. Even baptism in Jesus' name carries the claim: his authority, incorporation into his people. For a deeper dig, Schreiner points students to Buckwalter's fascinating work on Luke's Christology.

4. Seeking and saving the lost

   I. Howard Marshall's Luke: Historian and Theologian argues that Luke's great theme is salvation, and whether or not that is the whole story, it is surely central: the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. The King offers deliverance to his people, and he does it through his death.

5. Luke's theology of the cross

   Critical scholarship has long claimed Luke has no theology of atonement. Schreiner once put the claim to a doctoral student as a dissertation waiting to be written, and John Kimbel wrote it, published it, and now preaches every week as the pastor who succeeded Schreiner in his own congregation. The evidence is everywhere once you look: the words of the Lord's Supper; Acts 20:28, where God purchased the church with his own blood; the Passover setting; Isaiah 53 expounded to the Ethiopian in Acts 8; the cup Jesus takes in the garden, which in the Old Testament is the cup of God's wrath; and Barabbas, whose personal faith is beside the point because the point is literary: the guilty man goes free and the innocent dies in his place, a picture of what Jesus has done. The bread broken is his life broken for his people. And Luke says Jesus was hung on a tree, language no one used of crosses, because Deuteronomy 21:23 says the one hung on a tree is cursed of God: cursed for the sake of the people.

6. Atonement in narrative clothes

   Luke is not Paul, and a Gospel is not an epistle. The atonement in Luke comes in narrative form, in images and pictures, the cup, the tree, Barabbas, the broken bread, rather than in Pauline exposition, and that is a matter of genre, not absence. Schreiner admits that evangelicals have often been weak at interpreting narrative theologically, at ease with epistles and unsure what to do with stories. But the Gospels were written not merely to record history; they were written to disciple the church, and their narratives are meant to be applied to our lives.

7. Anointed twice, and working as God and man

   A student asks how the baptismal anointing relates to the exaltation, and Schreiner distinguishes: at his baptism Jesus was anointed as king; at his resurrection and ascension he was installed as the exalted, reigning, ruling king. The baptism also anticipates the cross: you are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, echoes the servant of the LORD, unseen by everyone present, John included, but not by Jesus, who spoke of fulfilling all righteousness with his death already in view. And were the miracles worked by the Spirit or by his deity? Both, Schreiner answers; make it Spirit-only and Christ's divinity is evacuated from his own actions, his forgiving, his healing. Here is the mystery Anselm pressed in asking why God became man: Christ's death forgives sins because he is fully God and fully man.

8. The kerygma

   What gospel do the speeches of Acts preach, from Peter at Pentecost to Paul in Pisidian Antioch? One message: prophecy is fulfilled in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and those who repent, believe, and are baptized receive the Holy Spirit. The speeches are stylized: Peter's Pentecost sermon reads aloud in half a minute, and no one believes he preached for thirty seconds. Luke gives inspired, accurate summaries, distilling hours to their core, which also explains Athens: Paul surely preached the cross there, but Luke's summary features the resurrection because the resurrection is what his hearers mocked.

9. Baptism belongs to the church

   Schreiner does not believe in baptismal regeneration, and he knows there are baptized people who are not saved. What fascinates him is the opposite modern error: the low view of baptism among believers today. In Acts it is unheard of to believe and remain unbaptized, and in all of church history it is unheard of to come to the Lord's table unbaptized; that people now think otherwise shows historical and biblical forgetfulness. A church may rightly take time to examine a candidate. But baptism is not a private matter: Schreiner has declined a student's request to be baptized in a river by him personally, and he tells of a man whose swimming-pool baptism by his own children could not be accepted as baptism at all. It is not a family affair; it is a church ordinance, and the Ethiopian eunuch, returning to a land with no church, is the exception that proves the rule.

10. Your faith has saved you

    Again and again Luke's Jesus says it: your faith has saved you. Luke is very good on the gospel: the Pharisee and the tax collector, the prodigal son, the table fellowship with sinners. It is justification by faith alone in Luke's own idiom, and everyone is invited to come and be saved.

11. Four Pentecosts, one church

    In Acts the Spirit drives the mission, nudging Philip to the eunuch's chariot and the church to the ends of the earth, and the kingdom spreads through four landmark events: Pentecost, Samaria, Cornelius's household, and the Ephesian twelve, tongues attending each, though Schreiner does not believe tongues are required today; each marks a movement forward in redemptive history. Pentecost reverses Babel, every hearer understanding, and inaugurates the church. Samaria is the telling case: the Samaritans, half-Jews with their own temple, destroyed by John Hyrcanus around 110 BC, and their own version of the faith, do not receive the Spirit from Philip, one of the seven, but only when the apostles Peter and John arrive, because the Samaritans cannot start a separate church. There is one church, it is apostolic, and its authority runs from the apostles; the tongues, which Simon evidently saw, verified that Samaritans truly belonged to the one people of God. At Caesarea the Spirit falls on uncircumcised Gentiles mid-sermon, no invitation given, and Peter concludes: they have received the Spirit just as we did, so we baptize them. And the Ephesian twelve, who knew only John's baptism, were not yet Christians but people living on the far side of redemptive history, and their receiving of the Spirit showed that Jesus is greater than John the Baptist, whose movement, remarkably, persists in some form even now.

12. The big picture to keep telling

    The summary Schreiner wants preachers to keep before their people: the King has come, and the kingdom has come, in a surprising, unexpected, already-and-not-yet way, not with apocalyptic power. The King's people are the humble who repent, believe, and trust in Jesus, and they are saved through the cross and the resurrection. John's Gospel waits ahead, telling the same truth in a different key, without the kingdom vocabulary at all.

1. Luke shows the Spirit nudging people into the mission: Philip to a chariot, Peter to a Gentile's house. When did you last act on such a nudge, and what kept you from the one you most recently ignored?

2. Acts knows no unbaptized believer, and no baptism apart from the church. What does your own baptism mean to you today, and how might your congregation recover its weight?

3. The kerygma fits in a minute: prophecy fulfilled, Christ crucified and risen, repent and believe. Compose the warm, plain sentence you would actually say to a neighbor, and pray for the chance to say it.