Lectionary Year B
December 22, 2002
Fourth Sunday in Advent
Luke 1:47-55

Step III: Immediate Context

(JFC) A. IMMEDIATE CONTEXT

Pre – This passage follows Elizabeth’s declaration that Mary’s child is the fulfillment of God’s promised Messiah.
Post – Following this hymn, we read of Mary’s remaining with Elizabeth and then returning to her home.

(JFC) B. COMPOSITIONAL WHOLE

Luke’s Gospel presents the nearest thing we have in the New Testament to a religious history. It declares how the Old Testament promises were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It presents Jesus as bringing God’s salvation to a sinful world by emphasizing that He ministered to those outcasts the world would ignore or destroy, the lost, the poor, the disenfranchised. He did so as God’s agent for saving the world.

(JFC) C. AUTHORSHIP

The early Church believed Luke wrote the Gospel bearing his name. Near the end of the second century of the Common Era, Irenaeus and a listing of canonical books mention Luke, the Gentile Christian (conf. Col 4:11) physician named in Philemon 24 and in Colossians 4:14 as a companion of Paul, according to Schweizer. It must have been written after the siege and fall of Jerusalem, after the year 70 CE.




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