Following the Prophet to Jerusalem

Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year C 2025; Luke 9: 51-62

This Gospel is the beginning of what has been termed Luke’s “travel narrative” (9:51-19:48). The opening words announce a change: “When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (9:51). The action now shifts from Galilee to the journey that will ultimately take Jesus to Cross and Resurrection. “Taken up” refers to the Ascension (cf. Acts 1:11, 22) as culmination of these events; a number of elements in this passage evoke the prophet Elijah, who was also “taken up” (2 Kings 2), and with whom Jesus has just been depicted at the Transfiguration (9:30). For once, remarkably, both lectionary tracks for the Hebrew Bible reading provide elements of these parallels. That Jesus “set his face” to go also picks up a biblical expression used for decisions and journeys (Gen 31:21; Num 24:1 etc.) and gives the change of focus more solemnity; it is this same “face” that has just shone with glory on that mountain (9:29), revealing his destiny.

Along the way Jesus will preach and teach, heal and exorcise, and gather an entourage. The first two episodes on the journey are not apparent success stories in movement-building though; they indicate that receiving and following Jesus are difficult, and that not all will respond.

The first story, about rejection at a Samaritan village, only appears in Luke. There is something almost like a mirror-image of it in Matthew, where Jesus himself urges the twelve not to go to gentile territory or Samaritan towns (Matt 10:5). Luke does share Matthew’s careful attention to how Jesus’ activity is focused on Israel (something readers concerned for inclusivity often seem to struggle with) prior to the resurrection and the following universal mission, but Luke is more willing to hint at implications for a wider sphere of action (as we saw last week with the Gerasene demoniac). So while both evangelists suggest Jesus restricts his ministry (but see below), here it is the Samaritans themselves who “close the border.”

The reason is given, even if it is not immediately clear: “because his face was set toward Jerusalem.” Jerusalem was apparently more a problem than Jesus (a Galilean) himself. It helps to know that the Jews had destroyed the Samaritans’ own temple on Mt Gerizim a few generations earlier, so the Jerusalem shrine was a sore point for these neighbors. These Samaritans did not really want to be “included” by people whose actions towards them had been hostile. Jesus’ apparent devotion to his own Temple—the goal of the journey— excluded what might otherwise have been some offer of hospitality to the travelers.

This is the first of three episodes or stories in Luke where Samaritans feature prominently, all in this travel narrative. Jerusalem features in Luke’s other Samaritan moments too: the second comes not long after this, when Jesus will conjure up a famous imagined Samaritan and others traveling between Jerusalem and Jericho to answer a question about neighbors (10:30–37). Rather later—close to the end of the travel narrative— a Samaritan leper who has been instructed to visit the Jerusalem Temple (!) seems to outdo his companions in gratitude (17:11–19). Today’s village episode and the beloved parable are close enough in the text (and the lectionary) to note that the poor opinion of Samaritans some readers might form here will shortly be qualified by that famous story that undercuts stereotypes, whoever produces them.

For the meantime though notice the end of this encounter, where James and John ambitiously seek permission to call down fire on the village, as though emulating Elijah (1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 1). Jesus rebukes them; they have misunderstood the situation, or perhaps discipleship itself. Whatever the Samaritans have done, these two are, in the end, the clearer models of how not to follow.

Jesus Traveling; James Tissot. Brooklyn Museum

The second part of the reading also concerns people who don’t manage to be included, or at least as they seem to expect (this is “Q” material; Matthew has a parallel passage with just the first two questions, but set during the Galilean ministry). The three figures who interact with Jesus are not identified in any way beyond the circumstances revealed in two of the exchanges. In all of the conversations Jesus is cautious, or perhaps just brutally frank, about what it means to be on this journey with him.

The first would-be disciple offers to follow Jesus anywhere. Given where Luke places this, it becomes a sort of glance back at the Samaritan response to Jesus which had been so place-dependent. This man by contrast starts promisingly, laying aside any condition or judgement about appropriate places to be, or to be with Jesus. Jesus responds however that there isn’t any particular “where” in following him; the itinerant nature of this exercise is a lot more than being open to the journey.

In the second instance it is Jesus himself who calls. The reason for delay, the burial of the dead, is hard although the ancient setting makes this a bit different. The man is not wanting to organize a “celebration of life,” or observe social niceties of mourning, but must literally bury his father; this was a sacred duty performed not by professionals but by family members themselves. It is not a bad or indifferent or unnecessary thing. Not much is gained by pondering the niceties of Jesus’ response, which is as curious as it is stark. Perhaps, as some commentators have said, it’s the “spiritually dead”—those who don’t follow at this time of urgency—who are being left to bury the physically dead, but attempting to negotiate the meaning of the saying to make it easier would just be another form of failure to follow.

Last comes a third and uniquely Lukan response to another would-be follower. By including a third exchange, this sequence now resonates with the three-fold conversation between Elijah and Elisha before the old prophet’s own “taking up,” where the younger had insisted on following the master too (2 Kings 2:1-6); but it also evokes the earlier story, where Elisha had been ploughing and then bade farewell to his family to follow the prophet (1 Kings 19). This last of the three exchanges with Jesus seems to broaden the demands of home from one single act of family duty to the whole web of relationships, and thus perhaps gets to the broader meaning we might otherwise have been reading into the previous example. Paul may have something like this saying in mind in Philippians 3:13: “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal.”

Following Jesus is to rethink what we might have assumed about ties of place and people. Despite constant pressure to turn the Gospel into a way of sanctifying nation, family, and all—no, the God of Jesus Christ is not available to be thanked or “loved” for your bombing raids— Jesus’ demands are really those of another community and another ruler altogether. The constant hints at Elijah would underline that to those familiar with his story and his constant conflicts with faithless rulers who sought to appropriate religion for their own ends. And while Christian nationalism obviously fails any such test as this, the abstract notion of “inclusion” also fails as a substitute for the curious reconfiguration of love and loyalty offered—and demanded—by the reign of God.

We are not told the outcomes of any of the three exchanges. Are we meant to think that any of the three followed? The lack of answers is not so much missing information as a hint that the reader must confront their own versions of the question. We find here how challenging it actually is to be included among Jesus’ followers, and how that may be at the expense of everything we thought we had to offer others in order to “include” them. How we ourselves respond to Jesus then becomes the nature of the journey, and the conclusion of the story.