Sermon text: Luke 9:51–62
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
The assigned reading for the second Sunday after Pentecost — that is, last week’s reading — highlighted Jesus’s power over the demons and the devils. The reading before that week, which we didn’t have because of Trinity Sunday: that reading was about Jesus calming the storm. Both lessons teach us that Jesus is in fact Lord of nature, heaven, and earth. It’s the first lesson that a Christian should learn. As the season of Pentecost begins, the lesson also reminded us that Jesus has rescued us from a kingdom governed by the devil, a kingdom of darkness, and has brought us into the kingdom of His light.
Now, having been rescued through Baptism and the word of God, it’s time for the next lesson to begin. Namely, Christians must be prepared to leave everything important in this life behind and to walk with Christ with an undivided loyalty — not with one foot in this world and another foot in the other, with conflicting priorities and conflicting systems of thinking — but rather complete devotion to the word of God and to Christ Himself. We are not to be a people of divided loyalty. And Jesus Himself highlights this by saying, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
The gospel lesson this morning began: “And it came about when the days were approaching for His ascension. He, Jesus, resolutely set His face to go to Jerusalem.” First, a little exegetical note on the ascension issue. There’s a bit of a difference of opinion over the use of the word “ascension” here. Some think that the reference here, that Luke puts regarding ascension in this case, is Jesus being lifted up on the cross: being ascended, placed up on the cross on Mount Golgotha, for God Himself to judge Him and to punish Him according to the law. He was going to Jerusalem to be betrayed into the hands of sinners, to be mocked, scourged, and crucified on the cross as the atoning sacrifice. Thus, He resolutely sets His face to this kind of ascension. That’s one argument. The other is more properly directed to that singular event where Christ is taken up into heaven to sit and to reign with His heavenly Father until the second coming of Christ Himself.
In the gospel reading, Jesus, it is said, is headed to Jerusalem. It was sometimes His practice — which He did here — to send ahead of Him one or two or three disciples to go and announce to a village that Jesus the Christ, the kingdom of heaven, was coming near to them, would pass through their village. When that message went out, one of two things tended to happen. First: people, some people, sometimes a great deal of people, would come out to meet Jesus and line the roads. They’d come to hear Jesus, to talk to Him, to make their petitions known to Him. People came out to see or hear Jesus. Or the second thing would happen: the local authorities would meet Jesus and let Him know He wasn’t welcomed in the city.
In this case, Jesus was passing through a Samaritan town, and they weren’t happy about it one bit. Samaritans were half-breeds, as you know: part Hebrew, part Gentile. They only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament because those were the books of Moses. They rejected in large the minor and the major prophets’ writing. They also maintained that the proper place to worship was on Mount Gerizim. And if you remember, the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at the well asked Him the question, “Where is the proper place to worship?” And Jesus told her that the Samaritans in essence didn’t know the one true God and were in fact worshiping Him in the wrong place. That it’s Jerusalem to which they ought to go to worship and to bow down before Yahweh Elohim, the Lord God, in the temple of Jerusalem.
As full-blooded Hebrew, Jesus was already at a disadvantage. He was unpopular with most Samaritans. There was great animosity between the two peoples. The fact that He was passing through their village on the way to Jerusalem made it even worse. He was dissing their temple, their worship, their mount, their heritage. And in their view, that’s what He was doing as He passed through. But He was singularly minded to go to the temple in Jerusalem for Holy Week, there to be betrayed. So we’re told they did not receive Him, because His face was set toward Jerusalem.
This is the second time in the verse that Greek phrase — that His face is set forth. He did it with a purpose. He was determined to get there. Nothing was going to stop Him from going to Jerusalem, to the temple, and ultimately to Mount Calvary. Verse 51 made it even more emphatic: He resolutely set His face toward Jerusalem. He was determined to make it to Jerusalem. He was going to fulfill the purpose for which He was sent into the world, whether anybody liked it or not, supported it or not, praised Him in the streets or not. He was going to go there to be rejected, to suffer, to be whipped, beaten, scourged, mocked, nailed to a cross, and lifted up to be rejected by His heavenly Father.
The gospel is really a study in contrasts. Actually, the first contrast: between Jesus and His two disciples — two of the disciples, the ones that got the nickname “the sons of thunder,” the ones who wanted to call down fire on the village for rejecting the coming of the Christ. They don’t want Jesus in their hometown. And they made it clear to Him. And these particular disciples didn’t care much for that treatment. And so when His disciples James and John saw how Jesus was being treated, they went to Jesus and said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
James and John want justice. The Son of God has come, and He’s being rejected, and for that the people of the village should be punished, according to these two disciples. But Jesus turned and rebuked them and said, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.” There’s the contrast: sons of thunder and the Lord of grace. Jesus schools them according to His mission. He has come to save people from their sin, not consume them in a judgment fire. As He said in another place, “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.”
Having been rejected by the Samaritans, Jesus does what He normally does when He’s rejected: He moves on to the next town, next village. This time, as they were going along the road, someone said to Him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Now, there you go. Things are looking up. That’s the kind of member we all want. We want that eager one, that new one that comes in with all kinds of life in him. He’s locked and loaded. He’s ready to do whatever he wants to do in the service of the kingdom. But color me skeptical. I’m always a little leery of people who want to join your church right off the bat. We just recently had one of those who helped himself to an offering, right? Be a little skeptical sometimes when they come.
The first thought that comes to my mind when somebody says, “What does it take to be a Lutheran? And can I become one here real fast?” First thing that comes to my mind is: easy come, easy go. And I guess there’s something about me that makes it easier to go. Those who join quickly tend to leave quickly.
Church membership, though, as per the Bible’s instruction, is a matter of both the heart and the mind. Membership requires a kind of proper instruction in doctrine and devotion to the community — to the church community — and active listening to the word of God. And Jesus never soft-pedals what it means to be a follower of His, and He doesn’t soft-pedal it in these villages either.
Jesus’s response to this overly enthusiastic prospective member: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” We never hear about this man again. He doesn’t become a disciple who walks with Jesus. The cost is too much for him. He can’t do it. He wants a divided loyalty, but he cannot have it.
Jesus turns His attention to a second man, looks at him and says, “Follow me.” Now, this man has what the church calls a direct and immediate call from Jesus to become a disciple. A pastor in a regular congregation: he gets a call from Christ to be a pastor of a congregation, but it comes through the church. It’s mediated. There’s a middleman, namely the church: the congregations who elect and call a pastor. It’s not a direct one from Jesus. It’s mediated through the congregation. But this man too stumbles, even though he has an immediate and direct call. “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” Now that seems a very reasonable request. In fact, it seems like the right thing to do. But in the middle of this act of respect for his father, Jesus tells him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
It seems a little cold and unseemly in the moment, doesn’t it? A command to simply walk away from his family obligations under such circumstances. He says the rest of the family — he says the rest of the family and friends of the deceased are dead too. Jesus condemns the whole lot as dead. That is: they are not in the kingdom of God. They have not received the word. They have not come out to welcome Christ. Something’s amiss.
He turns and He says what He said earlier to Peter, James, and John: “Follow me.” In their case, Peter, James, and John immediately dropped their nets and followed Him. He said, “Follow me” to the tax collector Matthew, who immediately left his tax booth and followed Christ. Left all behind. No divided loyalty there at that moment. They have trouble with it as they go on, like all of us do. But not there in that moment. So, we’ve so far dealt with one volunteer and one recruit. Two down, one more to go.
A third man comes up and says, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” The third man makes the same mistake as the other two, but his is worse. He doesn’t ask to go bury a dead relative. He asks if he can say goodbye: a simple act, one that would only take a few seconds. It’s a polite and proper thing to do when leaving one’s family and a house, you know.
Sorry, Dad. But Bob Horn was known for doing that. You’d have a party, Bob would be there. Sometime during a party, you notice Bob’s gone. And everybody would go, “Where’s Bob?” And one of the family members says, “He always leaves without saying goodbye.” So, you never know exactly when he leaves. Well, this guy wanted to prevent that kind of phenomenon from happening. I hope he bumps into Bob.
Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” When called to follow Jesus, not even the simple act of saying goodbye is an acceptable delay to the Teacher. Again, so much for the warm and fuzzy and flexible and emoting Jesus. Check another would-be disciple off the list. Jesus is now 0 and 4 on the recruiting, quote. Four men, four candidates, four with divided loyalties. A call to a heavenly task, but with divided loyalties. And the divided loyalties disqualify them for taking the call.
In the case of three men, they wanted one foot in each world. They wanted to be creatures of this world at the same time serving God and the kingdom of heaven on earth. That’s a big problem for a lot of people. They want Jesus, but they don’t want His doctrine. They want Jesus, but they don’t like His church. They want Jesus, but they don’t think there’s anything that Christians are really owed for respect. They don’t like what the other parts of the word of God teach, right? They don’t like what it says about sin and grace. They don’t like what it says about living as Christians in the world. They don’t like what it says about worshiping in spirit and truth. That’s a particular problem in our day. They don’t understand what it means when Jesus says, “Follow me.”
Every single person in the gospel reading today fails in one way or another to heed the call to follow Christ as a disciple. Two of the disciples themselves failed miserably, while the Son of God came into the world to save the world. These two want this part of the world torched. The men in the second village want it both ways as well. They want to follow Jesus, sort of. They are men of divided loyalties and half measures. Everyone in the gospel reading fails. In contrast, only one succeeds: Christ. Why? Because He resolutely set His face toward Jerusalem.
Luther had the following to write about priorities in the kingdom of heaven being set straight. He wrote: “Confidence and faith of the heart make both God and an idol.” That is, your faith can either set up an idol, or your faith can bend and bow to the one true God: Yahweh Elohim, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If your faith and trust is right, then your God is also true. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong — that is, if you have a wrong doctrine regarding God — then you do not have the true God. For these two belong together: faith and God, as Hebrews says in 11:6, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
Luther continued: “Now I say that whatever you set your heart on and put your trust in is truly your god.” The lesson from last Sunday is that we’re taken from a kingdom of darkness and put into a kingdom of light, the heavenly kingdom. The second lesson is that we are deeply conflicted creatures. The third in this season of Pentecost is a First Commandment lesson: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Not your living or your dead relatives, not your customs, not your versions of worship services. None of those things are in fact what makes you a disciple. Exodus 20:3 is very clear: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Fortunately, the one who set His face toward Jerusalem not only invites us to follow Him, but through the Holy Spirit, He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies us and the whole Christian church on earth to follow after Him. And where does He lead us? He leads us to His rejection. We are to follow Him to His conflict with the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees and the high priests and the governor appointed by Rome. We are to follow Him to His arrest. We are to follow Him to His beatings and His scourging. We are to follow Him up to Golgotha. We are to follow Him as He’s lifted up on the cross, crucified. We are to follow Him as He breathes His last death and says, “It is finished.” And then we are to follow Him in His resurrection and His ascension.
Not only did He take away our sins, but He also gave us His righteousness. Christ Jesus resolutely set His face toward Jerusalem. And that is: He set His face toward saving you. He brought you to the place where He is: His church, in the word and sacrament ministry. He is bringing you to your heavenly mansion. And in doing so, He’s doing it with the single-minded devotion that took Him to the cross and brought you the forgiveness of all your sins. You are following Him because He’s bringing you along. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.