What's Under Your Mattress?

I've been slowly (in a devotional kind of way) been reading through the book of John.  It's been a sincere and meaningful endeavor, but it's one of those things that I consider to be part of prayer - it's a two way conversation between me and God, so I feel like it would be a kind of kiss-and-tell type thing if I were to discuss much of that in this forum.  HOWEVER.  (There's always a "however" isn't there?)  However, these devotional times have lead me into other areas, and those areas I have no compunction discussing. 

The other day, while reading something in John 5, I was cross-referenced to a passage in the book of Luke.  The passage isn't really the point here, so I'll spare you the reading time.  The point I'm so circuitously getting to is this:  as I was reading this other passage in Luke, it struck me that this book must have been incredibly scandalous when it came off the presses.  

Have you ever wondered how a particular book of the Bible was received by those first readers?  Take the gospels for instance.   You can read any number of explanations about who the writers probably were, something about their intended audience, and more than a little about their imputed theology, but what was the impact of their first publication?  I figure that Luke, more than the other three, was tremendously controversial.  I imagine that his first readers were both scandalized and mesmerized.  It must have been the sort of book they had to hide under the mattress so that others wouldn't see it.  

When I was a kid, I don't know 10 or 11 years old or so, I went into my father's library and took down his copy of The French Lieutenant's Woman and sneaked it to my room.  I had heard my parents making veiled comments about it earlier in the summer and it was on the "grown ups" shelf, so - what was I to do?  As I read it, it became abundantly clear to me that I definitely wasn't supposed to be reading it, so after turning off the flashlight from reading it under the covers in bed, I promptly hid it under my matress where it was surely safe from discovery by my mom.  Don't be so judgemental, I’m sure that you had something hidden under your mattress too! 

The other gospels certainly sniff around the edges of the social scandal with their casts of prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners of various kinds, but Luke dives with lusty delight into a life with Jesus who seemed to know every sinner up close and personal and was enthusiastically willing to violate every social norm and barrier he came across.  It’s hard to imagine a religious leader, much less the Son of God, having such low standards of propriety considering the crowd he hung around with. 

I imagine that early readers of Luke’s gospel must have read it in disbelieving awe that lured them into a sense of freedom and fulness of life they never new existed, and I imagine that many new Lukan Christians appeared to others as unrepentant rebels who had no respect for traditional standards of morality.  They certainly couldn’t fit into traditional Jewish ways, nor were they very acceptable in Hellenistic communities.  Who knows what the Romans thought.  I also imagine that it was this very new found freedom from traditional social constraints that could have led them astray.  Failing to integrate the teachings of Jesus about a higher righteousness into their thinking and practice, they could easily have become first century versions of Haight-Ashbury hippies.  Perhaps that is what Paul’s many admonitions and correctives are all about, and maybe that’s why the pastoral letters are so intent on restoring some of the discipliine of traditional mores.

The point is that it’s very hard for our modern eyes to read Luke, or any of the gospels, with a full appreciation of how radical they were and how accurate were the words of the Pharisees when they accused the early Christians of turning the world upside down.  

And when the candle was snuffed, the book was carefully hidden under the mattress!