On the Move: SALT's Commentary for Third Week after Pentecost
Third Week after Pentecost (Year C): Luke 9:51-62
Big Picture:
1) This is the second week of “Ordinary Time,” a nearly six-month chronological set of stories narrating Jesus’ life, this year selected from the Gospel of Luke.
2) In this passage, Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem” — an idiom that signals his intent and determination (Luke 9:51). Over the next six months, we’ll walk alongside him, listening and learning from him as we makes our way to the holy city. And please note: according to Luke, Jesus’ destination isn’t only the cross, or even the cross-and-resurrection. It’s also and especially Jesus’ ascension, his being “taken up” (Luke 9:51).
3) In the next chapter, Jesus tells the famous “Good Samaritan” parable — and so that passage and this one are best understood together. Here in Luke 9, we learn about the tensions between Samaritans and Jews, and in particular, between Samaritans and Jesus’ disciples. And in Luke 10, in the “Good Samaritan” parable (the lectionary will turn to it in two weeks) Jesus makes the scandalous move of casting a Samaritan as the hero of a story about following the Jewish law.
Scripture:
1) In the ancient world, denying hospitality to a traveler was widely considered a serious insult. Why don’t the Samaritans receive Jesus and his entourage? “Because,” Luke says, “his face was set toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:53). Samaritans were the descendants of Jews and Assyrian occupiers, and they disagreed with Jews about the preeminent place to worship God: for Samaritans, it was Mount Gerizim; for Jews, it was Jerusalem. As Luke tells it, the fact that Jesus was bound for Jerusalem is what made him unwelcome from the Samaritan point of view. No sooner has Jesus “set his face” toward Jerusalem than he’s rejected for that very reason — a clear case of what today we’d call, “religious intolerance.”
2) Not to be outdone, Jesus’ disciples respond in kind, furiously asking Jesus if they should call on God to rain down fire and destroy the Samaritans (“religious intolerance,” indeed!). Jesus immediately rebukes them — and in the Good Samaritan parable he tells shortly thereafter (Luke 10:25-37), he completes this rebuke with a devastating reversal: So far from destroying your neighbors who believe differently than you do, you should be humble enough to learn from them, and follow their lead!
3) Finally, with Jesus’ initial rebuke still ringing in their ears, the group encounters three potential new recruits along the way — and these become occasions for Jesus to issue a trio of warnings about the true nature of discipleship. To the first potential recruit, Jesus candidly underscores that following him means living a life of itinerancy, with “nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). To the second, Jesus insists that following him means that typical social obligations will no longer apply; and to the third, he declares that following him means always looking forward, not backward. Taken together and considered in the wake of the drama in the Samaritan village, these three warnings portray discipleship as a striking contrast to conventional, ordinary life: not nestled at home, but on the move through the neighborhood; not bogged down in common duties, but on the move and proclaiming God’s reign; not looking backward to the entanglements of the past (including the clannish conventions of “religious intolerance”), but on the move, opening up, and looking ahead.
Takeaways:
1) Following Jesus, our faces will be “set toward Jerusalem” — and the journey ahead over these six months of Ordinary Time (and beyond) will amount to an itinerary focused on what genuine discipleship looks and feels like.
2) What is genuine discipleship? Right out of the blocks, Jesus warns against religious intolerance. We may be tempted to destroy (or merely defeat, demean, or otherwise dismiss) people of other religions or convictions or opinions or ways of looking at the world, but when we do, we effectively turn away from Jesus. On the contrary, Jesus calls us not only toward tolerance and harmony, but also toward a humble, generous affirmation of people who belong to other religions or no religion at all, even to the point of learning from non-Christians about how to be a better Christian — which is precisely what Jesus urges us to do with the Good Samaritan parable.
3) It’s become quite conventional these days to look down on our adversaries, political, religious, and otherwise. But Jesus proclaims that following him involves letting go of conventions like these, steadfastly looking ahead, not backward; proclaiming God’s dawning reign, not falling back into deadening routines; and embracing a life of getting out and about in the neighborhood, not withdrawing into our foxholes.
4) In other words, at its heart, discipleship is about being on the move, getting after it, “putting ourselves out there,” as we say. It’s no accident that one of the oldest names for the Jesus movement is “the Way” (you can even hear an echo of it in this passage, as Luke writes, “As they were going along the road,” or “along the way…” (Luke 9:57; see also Acts 9:2)). Following Jesus isn’t about standing still. It’s about being on the move — all the Way to Jerusalem.