the role of the lukan parables in terms of the purpose of luke's gospel

the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Luke, as Fitzmyer has contended, has deliberately
put Jesus’ programmatic announcement in the Nazareth synagogue at the beginning of his
public ministry to condense the entire ministry of Jesus and the reaction to it. 8 Luke here
makes it clear that the main recipients of the Gospel are indeed the poor. 9 The theme is
continued in Luke’s Beatitudes (6:20-26): “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of
God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.” The sermon on the Plain is
naturally linked to Jesus’ programmatic statement in the Nazareth synagogue. In addition, the
term here has the same meaning as in 4:18. 10 After the Beatitudes, the theme
appears again in the response to John the Baptist’s question of Jesus’ identity (7:22): “Go and
tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers
are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to
them.” The Lukan Jesus here confirms that Isaiah’s prophecy is being fulfilled in his ministry,
in particular, on account of the fact that the poor have good news preached to them. Apart
from the above cases, 14:12-14 can be added to God’s concern to the poor: “He said also to
the man who had invited him, ‘When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your
friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbours, lest they also invite you in return,
and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind,
and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection
of the just’” (Lk. 14:12-14). Jesus’ encouragement to invite the poor comes as quite a shock
in that the admonition of Jesus challenges drastically to modify their conventional social
values and behaviour in a Hellenistic context on the base of the value of reciprocity to acquire
their honour and standing. 11 At any rate, Jesus broke the social boundaries to ensure that all
people and especially the poor, had access to God and received honour from him. 12
8. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, 361. See also Beavis, “Expecting Nothing in Return: Luke’s Picture
of the Marginalized,” 357-68, here 359.
9. C.M. Tuckett, Luke (NTG; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 96. Shoemaker, “Good News to the
Poor in Luke’s Gospel,” 182, 188, 193, who follows Ernst Bammel, seeks to assert that Luke primarily
addresses the rich, including the wise, the influential and those of noble birth, rather than the poor. However,
there are, as Esler has pointed out, a lot of evidence to support the fact that Luke indeed addresses the poor,
apart from the fact that the Lukan community basically includes the poor. Esler, Community and Gospel in
Luke-Acts: The Social and Political motivations of Lucan Theology, 185.
10. Heard, “Luke’s Attitude toward the Rich and the Poor,” 47-80, especially 54-55; Fitzmyer, The Gospel
According to Luke, 629.
11. See Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political motivations of Lucan Theology,
194-95; H. Moxnes, “The Social Context of Luke’s Community,” Int 48 (1994), 379-89, here 386-87.
12. Green, Luke, 552-54.
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