When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53 but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village. 57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
I don’t normally begin a sermon by reading out the complete passage I’m intending to speak to but this is a risky passage not to read out.
The risk is that I’ll start speaking about the passage and referring to it, and those amongst us who are not already familiar with it (which is probably most of us) may well find themselves thinking ‘Jesus didn’t really say that, did He?’ or at least, ‘He didn’t really say it exactly like that, did He?’, and so I’m beginning by reading it out, exactly as it is written, lest anybody accuse me of making this up!
This is what is written, people, and it is indeed one of the more offensive passages in the Gospel of Luke. I wouldn’t say it’s the most offensive by any means, as indeed there’s a lot of material in Luke that is unpalatable. Even so, if we were to publish a special collection of sayings of Jesus that are hard to digest, and put them in order, from the most offensive to the least, this particular passage, I’d suggest, would probably still make it into the top half of the list!
It’s not quite on the level of “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children … they cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26) but it’s not “Come to me all ye that labour and are heavy-laden” (Matthew 11:28) either, is it? It is at the pointy end, I would suggest, of the offensiveness scale.
The Samaritans won’t deal with Jesus. James and John say ‘let’s burn them all!’ Jesus says ‘for God’s sake! No!’
A wanna-be disciple says to Jesus ‘I will follow you wherever you go!’ Jesus says to him ‘do you even know where I go?’ In terms of reasonable accommodation, I have nowhere to go!’
More disciples come to Jesus, wanting to be a part of the team and seeming very sincere, but they have some serious family responsibilities they need to get out of the way first. Jesus says ‘see you later!’
I’m abbreviating, but I want us to try to grasp these encounters as a whole. In terms of how they depict the relationship between Jesus and His followers, the very clear impression we get from this passage is that Jesus and those who followed Him were rarely ever on the same page! Jesus and His team had fundamentally incompatible understandings of just about everything that mattered. I find that disturbing!
I know that we who have been reading the Bible for years and years often take this sort of scenario for granted. We think of the twelve as a group of lovable duffers – a bit fluffy-minded and prone to emotional outbursts at times but basically sincere and endearing. Maybe so, but what sort of people were these twelve such that they and the women and the various hanger-oners could be with Jesus for the best part of three years and learn virtually nothing!
What makes this particularly incredible, to my mind, is that these accounts of the life of Jesus were put together by the very men being written about! I don’t mean Peter and James and John literally wrote down the words of the Gospels themselves, but they were involved, and certainly John survived long enough to read some of these Gospel accounts, and they were not flattering portrayals of him or any of his friends!
When you compare, for example, the Gospels with the stories of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, those men come across as flawless men of integrity when compared to the motley crew Jesus had with Him! You could be forgiven for assuming that the authors of the New Testament didn’t like the disciples yet, on the contrary, we know full well that the authors of the Gospels were almost certainly all themselves faithful disciples of those disciples!
I like to think that this is an indication of the fact that the twelve in their later years really didn’t take themselves too seriously, and that the Gospel-writers knew that those men were happy to be portrayed warts and all! The other more disturbing possibility, of course, is that the New Testament narratives actually are very generous in their depictions of the disciples, and that the reality was far worse!
Perhaps if we’d been there when James and John had confronted Jesus about what they wanted to do to the Samaritans (in the incident related to us today) we’d realise that the account in Luke chapter nine has been sanitized! Perhaps James and John acted far more vilely in their threats towards those people and started throwing punches at them? Perhaps they regularly screamed at Jesus, and the Gospel-writers had to tone down their language and their behaviour for the sake of the readership?
I’m not going to speculate further on that, but I will say again though that however we interpret the behaviour of the twelve and the other disciples in the narrative given to us today, what is clear is that Jesus and his followers were NOT on the same page, and that itself should disturb us!
You would think that, having lived pretty much in each other’s pockets for three years, the disciples would have adopted their master’s mindset by this stage. They hadn’t. That is disturbing. What is more disturbing still though, and what perhaps helps explain some of the tension between Jesus and His disciples, is that the mindset of Jesus seen here is not one any of us want to adopt! Indeed, in these clashes between Jesus and His disciples, it’s the disciples who get it right!
Isn’t that the case? Don’t we find ourselves siding with the disciples in these arguments? Do any of us really think Jesus was in the right in these confrontations?
Jesus says to one nameless man, “Follow me!” He says “Lord, first let me go and bury my father” (Luke 9:59). Our response would be, “Of course! Go and bury your father first, and give my condolences to the rest of your family.”
Another says, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home” (Luke 9:61). We would say, “No problem! Take as much time as you need! It’s a big decision. Make sure mum and dad understand what you’re doing. Hopefully you’ll have their full support.”
These are sensible responses. These are the responses we would make. This is how the first century disciples saw things. Twenty centuries later, we don’t see them any differently, and yet Jesus completely disrespects this common-sense approach!
“Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60), He says, and “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:62). These were tough things to say. They are still tough things to say!
Now, admittedly, it has been suggested by those who better understand the culture of the time that for the guy who wants to bury his father, his father is still very much alive at the time. That may be correct. In other words, it may be that the statement ‘let me first go and bury my father’ is a way of saying ‘let me first go and fulfil my responsibilities to my family’. It’s likewise possible that the request of the last guy (‘let me first say farewell to those at my home’) has similar implications – that it’s a farewell that may take a few years.
This may be the case, and I appreciate that this changes our perception of the dialogues somewhat. Even so, the requests of these wanna-be disciples – that they fulfil their responsibilities to their families before embarking on mad adventures with Jesus – seem entirely reasonable and commendable. We are supposed to honour our father and mother, surely, and we do have responsibilities to our families!
In truth, I can never read this passage without being reminded of a young man I was quite close to in a church I used to be involved in. This young guy was ready to drop out of his University course so that he could throw himself full-time into Christian ministry, and then he decided that he should really finish his course (as he only had a year to go) and after that throw himself into ministry, but then he decided that his parents had invested a lot of money in his education and that it was only proper that he should give a couple of years to the profession that his parents had worked so hard to prepare him for before heading off on a mad adventure with Jesus and, so far as I know, this guy has been working diligently as an accountant ever since!
Do I intend that story to be taken as a damning indictment on this then-young man? Not really. I just can’t overlook the close parallel to the narrative we read of here. There’s a choice to be made between a mad and impulsive course and a sensible, responsible one. We generally see it as a virtue to choose responsibly, and we urge our children to do the same. It’s Jesus, and Jesus alone so far as I can see, who is constantly urging us to choose the crazy path!
I read this account in Luke chapter nine and I ask myself ‘does anybody in this narrative actually have a half-decent understanding of what Jesus is on about?’ Sadly, I think it’s only the Samaritans in the story who come even close!
The Samaritans appear right at the beginning: “they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him” (Luke 9:52-53)
The Samaritans, I think, understood very clearly that Jesus was trouble, and so they didn’t want to have anything to do with Him! The disciples do want to deal with Him, of course. They just won’t follow the crazy course He has set for them!
Why is Jesus so unreasonable in His demands? Why is He so dismissive of social and cultural norms and even of family responsibilities? Why is He so hard to get on with? The answer, in this case, is actually given at the very opening of the story.
“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51)
Jesus ‘sets his face towards Jerusalem’, and it’s this that leads the Samaritans to reject Him and which makes His calls to action so urgent. Jesus faces Jerusalem – embracing His destiny in the final run-down to His own suffering and death. In that context it just doesn’t make sense for anybody to go back to business as usual!
There’s a sense, of course, in which Jesus had always been facing Jerusalem, in that He’d always known what lay ahead. The Gospel writer though sees a turning point at this stage in the journey where Jesus actively embraces this future and starts deliberately striding towards it!
I don’t want to suggest that we all need to face Jerusalem in the way that Jesus did, as I recognise that His destiny in this regard was unique. Even so, I think it is of great benefit to us all, to face squarely our own mortality, and to embrace that.
We are all heading towards death and destruction (at least at a personal level). That’s not to say that our demise will be as violent as Jesus’ or that it is imminent. Even so, it is our future, and it does make a real difference, I believe, if we can embrace that rather than simply going on trying to avoid thinking about it.
It’s been the common testimony of those who returned with me from Syria recently, that the journey helped put things in perspective for them. It helped them recognise that a lot of the things we get stressed about here really are just first-world problems that aren’t worth stressing about. Conversely, the backdrop of violence and death there gives you a heightened sense of what is really important in life. So many things that seem important – even legitimate responsibilities to family and community – really aren’t that important, and are certainly not that urgent, and other things that really are important need to replace them as our personal priorities NOW!
“Let the dead bury their own dead… No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Why? Why so harsh? Why so urgent? Because time is short! Your time is short, my time is short, and our world doesn’t have much time either! Go, and proclaim the kingdom of God!
sermon delivered at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill, June 2016
