Luke Stopped and Wrote Down Three Names Nobody Would Have Missed

If she stopped, it would take about four weeks for anybody to work out what had been happening.

She does the flowers, which nobody thinks about. She does the thing with the keys, which nobody knows about at all. She washes what needs washing. She has, for eleven years, arrived about forty minutes before anybody else and left about forty minutes after.

She has never been at the front of that room in her life and does not want to be, and if you offered her a microphone she would be genuinely distressed, so this is not about ambition.

It is about the quieter thing, which is that there is no record. Nothing she has done exists anywhere except in the fact that the room was ready. And a person can go a very long time on that and then hit a week where the absence of any record starts to mean something it did not mean before.

There is a moment in Luke where a historian, in the middle of describing something else, stops and writes down three names.

The passage is about a tour and then it is not

The sentence starts as a summary of an itinerary.

And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him. (Luke 8:1, King James Version)

That is the headline. The preaching, the villages, the twelve. It would have been a complete sentence and nobody would have noticed anything missing.

And then Luke keeps going.

And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, And Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance. (Luke 8:2-3)

He names three of them and mentions that there were many more.

You are the sort of detail a careful historian stopped to include. Luke 8:3 adds the names after a complete sentence had already been written, and it is by the Spirit, 2 Timothy 3:16, under whose inspiration all Scripture is given, that the aside survived at all.

Which ministered unto him of their substance

The phrase describing what they did is worth slowing down for, because it is financial.

Ministered unto him of their substance. Their own resources. They were funding it.

Which means that behind the itinerary in verse 1, the villages and the preaching and the twelve, there was a set of people paying for the food and the travel, and that arrangement is invisible in the headline and would have stayed invisible if Luke had not stopped.

I would point out what that does to the shape of the whole account. The famous part of that verse is the preaching. The part that made the preaching possible is in the next verse, in smaller print, with names.

And the names are specific and slightly odd. Joanna is identified by her husband's job in Herod's household, which is a strange detail to include unless somebody knew her and wanted her findable.

You are behind a headline that could not have happened without you. Luke 8:3 records the funding immediately after the preaching, and it is by the Spirit under whose inspiration Scripture was given, 2 Timothy 3:16, that the second half of that account exists.

God says forgetting it would be an injustice

The New Testament has a sentence about this written to people in exactly this condition, and the construction is legal.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (Hebrews 6:10)

Not unrighteous to forget. Forgetting would be an injustice, and God will not commit one.

That is a much stronger claim than gratitude. Gratitude is a feeling and it comes and goes and depends on somebody noticing. This is a statement about God's character being engaged by the question of whether the work is remembered.

And the tenses: have ministered, and do minister. The eleven years already done and the Sunday coming.

You are on a record that God calls it unrighteous to lose. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 1:13, that a believer is sealed, which is a word about being kept rather than remembered.

Somebody was writing it down

There is an image in Malachi that is almost startlingly literal about the record.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. (Malachi 3:16)

A book of remembrance was written before him.

The scene is people talking to each other, ordinarily, in a discouraging period, and the response described is not a voice from heaven. It is somebody writing it down.

And the LORD hearkened, and heard it. Two verbs about listening, in a chapter where the complaint is that serving God appears to be pointless.

And the next verse calls them a peculiar treasure, which is a word about a personal collection rather than about an inventory.

You are in a book that was written while you were not being noticed. Malachi 3:16 records the writing as God's response to ordinary conversation, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, in a knowing no room could produce.

And He counts it as done to Him

The last piece is the one that changes the address on the whole eleven years.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40)

Ye have done it unto me.

And the striking thing about that passage is that the people being commended do not recognize the list. They ask when they did any of it. They are not being modest; the text has them genuinely puzzled, because from the inside it was flowers and keys and dishes.

That is the answer to the absence of a record. There is a record, it is kept somewhere else, and the people on it will apparently not recognize their own entries.

If the invisibility has become heavier than a frustration, if it has reached the point where you think nobody would notice if you were not there, that is a thing to say out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour.

You are doing it unto Him, and He says so about work nobody recognized as work. Matthew 25:40 has the commended people unable to identify their own list, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that the witness about a person is borne rather than compiled by a room.