Knowing, Becoming, and Story

I became a father in March 2003. I was pouring concrete in Reed, Colorado, the day Melodie went into labor. I got the call, cleaned up my tools, and drove the 40 minutes home. When I got home, Melodie was watering plants and tidying up the house. I jumped in the shower and shaved. I wanted to be clean-shaven when my baby arrived. My daughter was born late that night. The delivery went smoothly. We were young and happy and naïve, and now I was a dad. I nuzzled my clean-shaven cheeks into my new daughter’s face. It was good and beautiful, but it all felt normal. Life-changing, to be sure, but normal. Some people talk about how their lives changed the moment they became fathers. Yet for me, the transformation was gradual. The father I would become would be revealed slowly over decades. When I became a father, I thought I knew what to expect. I observed the lives of fathers and parents I knew. Some were good at it and made it seem easy. Some, I couldn’t understand why they chose the methods they seemed to employ. I thought that what I needed most was to believe the right things about what it means to be a father and to live accordingly. And yes, that is true. But there is so much more to it. All my observations came from a limited and privileged vantage point. I had to confront the story I was actually living in. I could only know so much from the outside. I didn’t know the backstories or family dynamics of most of the other fathers I knew, nor did I really know their temperaments or those of their children. But more importantly, I didn’t have their lived experience or my own to understand their circumstances. But I would.

We often approach the narratives we find in scripture from a similarly limited vantage point. I have found we especially approach the Gospel narratives this way. We arrive at the text carrying theological assumptions that took centuries to develop,1 and we weigh what we read against those assumptions before we’ve finished the first paragraph. The divinity of Jesus is one of the clearest examples. We believe Jesus is divine — a settled theological claim for many of us — and so we read the Gospel accounts, looking for confirmation and stacking evidence. We turn the story of the Gospel into fodder for YouTube apologetics debates. I don’t think we are being dishonest. It’s just hard not to assume the points of an argument when we already know the conclusion. We tend to skim the text, looking for evidence rather than actually reading and entering into the narrative. To me, defending a set of theological propositions is just way less interesting than the story—the flesh and blood story—we are actually presented with.

This isn’t just a scholarly problem. It’s a human one. We do it with everything. We read the ending into the beginning. We meet someone and immediately start sorting them into categories. We walk into a room full of people, and in about 4.5 seconds, we’ve decided what kind of crowd it is. The brain is efficient, and efficiency has a cost: we stop paying attention to things that don’t fit the story we’ve already started telling. On the one hand, when we re-read a story, we see things we missed the first time. On the other hand, when we already “know” the story, even if this is technically our first time encountering it, we can and often do miss the details of what’s actually in it.

So, what if we reread the Jesus story again—for the first time?

Luke was not the first person to tell the story of Jesus.2 He says so himself. His opening lines acknowledge that: “Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1 NRSVue). He knew those accounts. He knows what they say.3 And he decides to tell it again. Not because the others got it wrong, but because there is something in the careful following of the plot details that matters. The Greek word he uses for his own method, parakoloutheo, means something like a close investigation, a tracking of events from the inside. Luke is not just reporting accurate information; this involves interpretation. Luke is following the story, allowing the story to lead—wherever it takes us. And he intends his reader to do the same.

Robert Tannehill describes what Luke produced as the longest and most complex narrative in the New Testament, written by “an author of literary skill and rich imagination who had a complex vision of the significance of Jesus Christ.”4 What’s striking, especially if you’ve spent time with John’s Gospel, is what Luke doesn’t do. John opens with a declaration: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). Thesis first. Identity announced before the story begins. Luke opens with a priest burning incense in the Temple and a couple too old to have children. There is no prologue about cosmic origins, no narrator stepping in to tell you who this person is. The identity of Jesus in Luke is something you arrive at gradually, through the accumulation of scenes and encounters and moments of partial recognition, rather than something you’re handed in the first paragraph.

That’s not a deficiency. It’s a feature, not a bug. What looks like a low or underdeveloped view of Jesus is actually Luke doing something much more subtle than a plain declaration of Jesus’s divine nature. The narrative leads you to expect the right things, and then, before you can lock in the conclusion, the story shifts. You come right to the edge of naming who Jesus is, and Luke pulls back. King? Yes, but… Divine? Maybe… He confirms your suspicions and then disappoints them in the same breath. The narrative leads the reader to expect the right thing, but often in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons— so that when the recognition finally comes, it arrives on the story’s own terms rather than ours. This is not evasiveness. It’s a strategy for a progressive unveiling of the significance of Jesus’s identity.

Consider whom Luke chooses to let in on this. The first witnesses to Jesus’s birth are not dignitaries or priests. They are shepherds, “scorned in the first century as shiftless and dishonest,”5 exactly the kind of people a royal birth announcement would bypass. Simeon, the first person in the narrative to grasp the full significance of what is happening, is described only as righteous and devout. He is obscure, barely a footnote to the historical record. Anna is a 105-year-old widow who spent her days fasting and praying at the temple, with little social standing and no platform. In Luke’s account, divine knowledge about the meaning of what is transpiring is consistently given to someone obscure and less than noteworthy. And that is the point. Faithful, Spirit-led individuals are brought in on what is being revealed, even if they do not fully see or understand the implications. The people who should have known are the last to find out. The people nobody was watching are the first to see. That pattern holds all the way through.

As Kavin Rowe observes, Luke “does not confine his christology to certain key statements but instead develops his christological perspective via the intricate interplay” of the narrative, building meaning across characters, encounters, and moments of recognition and misrecognition all the way to the end.6 Stories written as stories, Rowe notes, “are probably meant to be read as such.”7 Luke is not making an argument that happens to be told in narrative form. The story is the argument. This logical progression is significant because it does not presuppose or assert the thesis from the outset; it gently and subtly guides the reader toward the conclusion. Through repeated scenes and motifs, the Gospel gradually leads readers to discern who Jesus is and to grasp the particular way in which his identity is exercised and revealed—both to the reader and to the characters in the story. Which means the argument only works if you follow it in order, from beginning to end, without skipping to the conclusion.8

This is what Tannehill calls “narrative rhetoric”: the way Luke constructs “a narrative world which readers are invited to inhabit imaginatively,” shaped by particular values and beliefs that are meant to be convincing precisely because they are discovered rather than declared.9 There is, Rowe writes, “a cumulative aspect to the argument, one which depends on the work as a whole … only when we arrive at the end can we look back to divine the whole.”10 Luke very carefully crafts this narrative and intends his reader to follow it closely. When you do, something happens that doesn’t happen when you’re told what to believe: you start to see it for yourself.

The whole narrative is building toward a single moment of recognition. Near the end of Luke’s Gospel, two disciples walk the road to a village called Emmaus alongside a stranger. They don’t recognize him. They speak with him for miles about the very events he was central to, laying out their grief and their shattered hopes, and they still don’t know who it is. Then they stop for a meal. The stranger takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. Their eyes are opened, and he vanishes from their sight. That is Luke’s culminating move — not a spectacular revelation, not a throne or a triumph, but a quiet one, in the breaking of shared bread. Ancient Greco-Roman literature had a word for this kind of narrative moment: anagnorisis, the dramatic unveiling of a hidden identity. Luke knew the device. He used it carefully throughout the story to bring the reader to exactly this point. The truth of Jesus’s identity comes as a moment of revelation. That is exactly what a story requires.

That, I would argue, is exactly the point.

I became a father in March 2003 and thought I knew what it meant. I had watched fathers. I had formed opinions. I had a framework. Do better than what I saw before me or than what I experienced. What I didn’t have was the lived experience of following the story from the inside, which turns out to be the only way you actually learn what fatherhood is.

Luke invites the same thing. Not a framework applied to Jesus, but an experience of following the story closely enough to arrive somewhere you couldn’t have gotten by being told. So let me ask you this question: What do you actually know about Jesus? And what have you simply inherited? Not as an accusation. As a genuine distinction. There may be more room between those two things than you’ve allowed yourself to notice.

A faith formed by following a story is different from a faith formed by inheriting a verdict. I find it interesting that what we are given is four stories about Jesus rather than an evidence file or debate notes. A faith formed by narrative tends to hold conclusions with more awareness of what it took to get there, which makes it a little harder to weaponize and a little more open to where the same movement of God might lead next. The Gospel writers seem to think that matters. The way you arrive at something shapes what you do with it once you’re there.

What Luke is setting the stage for, across his Gospel and into Acts, is a community that learns to recognize Jesus — in Scripture, at the table, in mission, and by the Spirit. That community doesn’t arrive at its convictions by having them handed down from a podium. It arrives the way the disciples on the Emmaus road did: by walking, by listening, by sitting down to break bread with a stranger, and by having their eyes opened in the ordinary.

This post was originally posted on Substack.