Luke’s gospel opens with a dedication, and the dedication opens with a title: “most excellent Theophilus” (1:3). He is the first person we meet in the book, and he arrives with his rank attached.
The sentence around him is the most carefully built in the gospel. It is long and balanced, in polished Greek, the way an educated writer of the day opened a serious book for an important reader. Everything about it says that Theophilus mattered and that Luke knew it.
Then the story begins, and it does not stay with people like him. Within a few pages a woman from a village no one had heard of is singing that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (1:52–53). Shepherds hear the news of the birth before anyone of rank does. The book that opens with a bow to a man of standing goes on to tell, again and again, of a God who turns standing upside down.
So the question is easy to ask and hard to answer. What was Theophilus supposed to do with this book? And since we are reading it over his shoulder, what are we supposed to do with it?
A patron and his client
The title tells us where Theophilus stood. In Acts, Luke’s second volume, the same address is used for the Roman governors Felix and Festus (Acts 24:2–3; 26:25). It was how you spoke to someone with rank. His name, a common one in that world, means something like “loved by God.” Luke adds only that he has “been instructed” (1:4). Whether that means he was already a believer or had simply heard reports about this new movement, the sentence doesn’t say, and it doesn’t need to.
What the dedication does show is a relationship everyone in that world would have recognized. Roman society ran on patronage, ties between people who were not equals. A patron gave what those beneath him could not get on their own: money, protection, a job, an introduction. The client gave back loyalty and public praise. Honor was the currency, and everyone knew who stood above whom.
Books moved through the same ties. There were no publishers. A writer dedicated his work to a patron, who paid scribes to copy it and passed it around his household and friends. The Jewish historian Josephus did exactly this for his patron Epaphroditus, and addressed him with the same title. So when Luke writes “most excellent Theophilus,” he is writing as a client to his patron. The first line of the gospel sits inside the world of rank, and Theophilus’s money may be the reason the book was copied at all.
God used the ordinary machinery of that world to carry this story to us. That does not make the machinery good. The great Roman roads that let the gospel travel so quickly were built so that legions could march out and conquer. But God speaks into the world as it is. Here he used a system built on rank to deliver a book about a God who overturns rank. A patron may well have paid for the copies of Mary’s song, the song in which God brings the powerful down from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.
Mirrors in the book
Read Luke as Theophilus might have, and you start to notice how many people in it look like him.
In chapter 7 a Roman centurion in Capernaum has a slave who is close to death. He sends Jewish elders to ask Jesus for help, and they make his case the way the patronage system taught everyone to make a case: “He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us” (7:4–5). He is a benefactor, and benefactors are owed favors. But before Jesus reaches the house, the centurion sends friends with a different message: “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof” (7:6). The elders say he is worthy. He says he is not. Jesus is amazed at him. Here is a man near the top by Rome’s measure who chooses not to use his standing.
In chapter 8, women travel with Jesus and the twelve: Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward, Susanna, “and many others, who ministered to them out of their own resources” (8:3). These are people of some means, but their giving does not buy them a place above anyone. Luke calls it ministry.
In chapter 14, at a dinner, Jesus watches the guests choose the places of honor and tells them to take the lowest place instead. Then he turns to the host: “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you” (14:12–14). That goes to the engine of the whole system. Patronage ran on return: I give, and you owe me. Jesus tells hosts to give where no return is possible.
Then there is the long gallery of the rich. A man builds bigger barns and dies that night (12:16–21). A rich man feasts every day while Lazarus lies at his gate (16:19–21). A ruler who has kept every commandment goes away sad, “for he was very rich” (18:23). And a chapter later, in Jericho, a chief tax collector who “was rich” hurries down from a tree, welcomes Jesus, and gives away half of what he owns (19:1–8). Luke sets the sad ruler and the glad tax collector almost side by side. Theophilus would have had to decide which of them he was.
Finally, at the Last Supper, the disciples argue about which of them is the greatest. Jesus answers, “The kings of the gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you” (22:25–26). Benefactor was not an abstract word. Cities carved it on monuments to the wealthy men who paid for their buildings and feasts. It was the honor men like Theophilus sought. “I am among you,” Jesus says, “as one who serves” (22:27).
Where security lies
Luke tells Theophilus why he is writing: “so that you may have a firm grasp” of what he has been taught (1:4). The Greek word at the end of that sentence, asphaleia, means certainty, but it also means safety and security. It is solid ground under your feet.
A man of rank knew where security came from. It came from what you had, from the people who owed you, from the honor your name carried. Luke has a parable about that kind of security. The man with the full barns says to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God says to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you” (12:19–20).
Luke offers Theophilus different ground. It is not an argument, and not a guarantee of his position. It is a story: a long, carefully ordered account of a God who keeps his promises. To an old priest and his wife who had waited for years. To a woman from Nazareth. To shepherds, widows, lepers and tax collectors. If God kept faith with them, Theophilus could trust him too. Read this way, the book does not take away his security. It moves it, from his standing to God’s faithfulness.
Mary had already sung it: God “sent the rich away empty” (1:53). Not because God despises them, but because what they were holding could never hold them.
Where we sit
So where do we find ourselves in this book? With Theophilus, the man of rank it is dedicated to? Or with the shepherds and the widows, the people it lifts up?
Most of us, if we are honest, reach for the second seat first. When Mary sings that God has “lifted up the lowly” and “filled the hungry with good things” (1:52–53), we hear ourselves in it. Often we are right to. Many of us are immigrants or the children of immigrants. We are a minority in the country we live in, sometimes the only one in the room who looks the way we do. Some of us are stretching a paycheck that doesn’t stretch far enough. Some of us graduated, did everything we were told to do, and still can’t find work that pays the rent. That is real, and Luke’s good news is real for it. Jesus came for people in exactly those places.
But read the next line of the same song: God has “sent the rich away empty.” Who are they? It is easy to point at someone with more. Yet if you are reading this on a phone, under a roof that keeps out the rain, with water you can drink from the tap, then by the measure of the whole world you are a long way from the bottom. Most people who have ever lived would gladly have traded places with you.
In some rooms we are the outsiders. In others, without noticing, we are the ones sitting at the head of the table.
So we live in between, and the seat keeps changing. At work we may be the foreigner; at a family gathering back home, we are the one who made it in America. In one conversation we are the person no one listens to; in the next we are the one with the degree. Luke does not let us settle into either seat. He speaks good news to us where we are left out. And where we have more than we realize, he asks of us what he asked of Theophilus: the lowest place at the table, giving where there will be no return, being among others as one who serves.
The centurion in chapter 7 sat in both seats at once. By Rome’s measure he stood near the top. Among the people he had come to love, he would always be a foreigner. He did not use the first to fix the second. He said, “I am not worthy,” and trusted the word.
Luke does not tell us what Theophilus did with the book. We don’t know whether he took the lowest place or stayed where he was. What we know is that Luke wrote it for him with great care and addressed him by name. The dedication does not shame the man of rank. It invites him. And when Luke wrote to him the second time, he dropped the title and kept the name. Theophilus, loved by God. That name was always bigger than the title in front of it, and it is one any of us can answer to, from whichever seat we are sitting in.