The Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist

Hello again. Today is a great day for fans of St. Luke, namely his feast day. As I've said before, your Daily Officer has always enjoyed Luke, partly because of the sense of his outreach to the common (working) person. Also because he comes at the whole experience of Christ from the perspective of a Gentile. (That's not necessary for salvation, by any means, but is interesting. Compare him to st. Paul, who was a Pharisee and vigorous defender of his original faith before his conversion.) Finally, Luke was a physician, and your Daily Officer has himself planned a career around the healing arts. All this goes towards explaining why I wear a St. Luke medal around my neck. I just wish we knew something more about Theophilus. There are competing ideas of who he might be. These suggestions come from the Wikipedia entry that bears his name:

• Coptic tradition asserts he was a Jew of Alexandria
• Another tradition claims he was a converted Roman official, possibly Titus Flavius Sabinus the Younger, a former Prefect of Rome and older brother of future Roman Emperor Vespasian, owing to the honorific, "most excellent" (Lk. 1:3). As Titus Flavius Sabinus, Theophilus is given a crucial role in the novel The Flames of Rome by Paul L. Maier, where he is given the dedication of the "Gospel of Luke" and "Acts of the Apostles" by Luke the Evangelist.
• Another tradition maintains that Theophilus was not a specific person, as "theophilus" means "lover of God", and thus the books could be addressed to anyone who fits that description.
• Some also believed that Theophilus could have been Paul's lawyer during his trial period in Rome.
• Some also identify Luke's Theophilus with Theophilus ben Ananus, High Priest of the Temple of Jerusalem from 37 to 42. In this tradition Theophilus would have been both a kohen and a Sadducee.

In the Daily Office we started this morning with the introduction and dedication of the Gospel of Luke, and we finish at Evening Prayer with the beginning of Acts (which, as you know, has the same dedication and is believed to be written by the same author). It's nice that we're working through Acts and Luke anyway; next year St. Luke's feast day will come while we are reading Matthew and 1 Corinthians. Next year this feast will serve to help us recall St. Luke; this year, it sits as a nice exclamation point on top of the devotions we are already doing. I'll be at church tonight to celebrate his feast; will you?