Hilton Head Island, SC – February 25, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 9:51-62
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And it came to pass, when the time came that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem. – Luke 9:51 (KJV)
Three of the four Gospel writers each devoted about three-fifths to two-thirds of the things they wrote about Jesus from the time he began his public ministry in the region of the Galilee to his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The remainder of what they wrote records the events during Holy Week and Jesus’ resurrection and its aftermath.
Luke, however, followed a different chronology. The Galilean ministry is covered in the first forty per cent of his Gospel, and then during the next forty per cent Luke places Jesus on a long, slow, winding journey to Jerusalem, leaving the last twenty per cent of his telling of the Jesus Story for the dramatic events of Holy Week. We don’t know how long Luke might have imagined the journey took, but according to the way he tells it, it would have taken many weeks or a few months. In Matthew, Mark, and John, however, the journey to Jerusalem presumably only took several days or at most a week or two.
Why would there be such a discrepancy in the telling of the last fateful months of Jesus’ life? Usually John deviates from the chronology of the synoptic Gospels, but here he agrees with Mark and Matthew. It is Luke who takes a different path in telling the story. So what is going on?
Luke was a Gentile, and the other three were Jews. Therefore Luke may have perceived Jesus through the eyes of someone who came from the pagan world into the brand-new world of New Testament Christianity. He had not grown up as a Jew, nor was he familiar with Jewish life, religion, or customs.
Here is a preacher’s hypothesis. I can’t prove it, nor do I think it can be proven. But you folks are open-minded and kind and tolerant, and you have put up with many uncommon ideas from me through the years. So here is my hypothesis: Luke perceived the ministry of Jesus to be more directed to outcasts and outsiders, people such as himself, than did the other three Gospel writers. Luke never knew Jesus, and was probably thirty or more years younger than Jesus. In some fashion Luke heard the story of Jesus from other people, certainly including Paul, because he traveled with Paul on missionary journeys. This is recorded in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, which Luke also wrote. But Jesus was a Jew, and the other Gospel writers were all Jews, and all the original followers of Jesus were Jews. Luke was not. He was a Gentile, and therefore an outsider, and further, to many Jews, an outcast, simply because he wasn’t a Jew. If you think you’re part of the Chosen People, you think differently than if you have never thought you are a “chosen” person.
“The Courageous Journey of Jesus” is described from Luke 9:51 through Luke 19:28. Those ten chapters have Jesus going hither and yon, but always, always, always, Jesus knows he is ultimately headed toward Jerusalem and toward The Ultimate. Furthermore, according to what Luke writes about him, Jesus seemed to know beyond any doubt what awaited him when he got to the Holy City. Jesus was certain he would die there.
The Revised Standard Version gives Luke 9:51 a rather different nuance from the way the King James Version translates that verse. Here it is in the RSV: “When the days drew near for (Jesus) to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” “To be received up” implies the crucifixion, followed by the resurrection, but Luke never clearly states that. During the journey to Jerusalem, presumably none of the apostles knew exactly how it would end. That is one way of interpreting this pivotal statement, which proclaims that the courageous journey was about to begin. Jesus felt the time had come, and he willingly began what he believe would be his fateful --- and fatal --- walk into eternity.
The KJV puts Jesus’ decision into a different category. “And it came to pass, when the time came that (Jesus) should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.” If we didn’t know before that this was the KJV, we know it now, because “stedfastly” is spelled in the old-fashioned Elizabethan way. The “received up” idea is repeated verbatim in both versions, but the King James Version suggests that Jesus began his journey with considerably more conscious determination. “He stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.” That translation suggests that Jesus strongly suspected what awaited him at the end of the road. There would be increasing resistance, hatred, and ultimately death. Nevertheless, Jesus resolved to start the journey, as odious and foreboding as it was going to be.
The very first event following Jesus’ decision to start toward Jerusalem is that he sent some of his followers to a village of Samaritans to tell the people there that the prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, was coming their way. They refused even to listen to Jesus. The two brothers, James and John, who were two of the first four disciples whom Jesus named, asked if they should call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans. (Jews didn’t much like Samaritans anyway, nor had they for at least eight hundred years.) Jesus severely rebuked James and John for such atrocious thoughts, and they all went quietly along to another village.
This minor episode doesn’t mean much to us, but it had to have been an enormous dilemma to all of Jesus’ disciples. All of them were Jews, as Jesus himself was a Jew. Jews and Samaritans didn’t mix! They just didn’t. It would be like expecting Iranians and Israelis to become chums, or Yankee and Red Sox fans to become the best of buddies, or a Hilton Head Islander and a Blufftonian to think they are both two peas from the same pod. As far as Jews were concerned, Samaritans were Jews who had married Canaanites for generations, and had thus polluted the religion God intended Jews to follow, thereby ceasing to be Jews altogether.
Still, the very first place Jesus went when he began his journey to the Holy City was deliberately to pass through a Samaritan village, hoping to preach to the people there. The disciples were shocked and dismayed by that decision, and the Samaritans were not much positively disposed to it either. But Jesus intended to extend his mission to outsiders; of that there seems to be no doubt. And he intended that from the moment he started toward Jerusalem. Luke, the outsider, liked this approach, but the earliest Jewish Christians might not be so thrilled.
The next thing that happened is that a man, presumably a Jew, ran up to Jesus, telling him he would follow him wherever he went. Obviously he must have heard something about Jesus for him to say that. Jesus warned him what it would be like to become his disciple. “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (9:58). Luke doesn’t tell us, but we deduce the would-be follower didn’t follow, if it meant that he would have to give up the comfort of home and family and friends.
Jesus said to another man he met along the road, “Follow me.” That was the first thing he said to Peter, Andrew, James, and John when he met them on the shores of the lake of the Galilee, and they followed him. But this man said he must first go and bury his father. We don’t know if his father had actually died, or if he even was sick, but Jesus said to him, almost with utter coldness, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (5:60). Luke doesn’t say whether the man signed on, but because he doesn’t say it, we may assume the potential recruit swiftly backed away from the ultra-passionate recruiter.
A third man said to Jesus, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home” (9:61). Again, with what appears to be indifference at best or a complete lack of warmth at worst, Jesus said, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (9:62). It is almost as though Jesus wanted to dissuade Jews from becoming followers.
Could it be that Jesus was feeling rejected by the people he knew best in Nazareth and Capernaum and by the lakeside, and he thought maybe he might do better striking out in a new direction with new potential disciples? If so, he was already zero-for-four; the Samaritans wanted nothing to do with him, and the three other presumably Jewish would-be disciples all gave him excuses for why they couldn’t go to Jerusalem with him either.
There is an old camp song that declares, “Jesus walked a lonesome valley/ He had to walk it by himself/ O, nobody else could walk it for him/ He had to walk it by himself.” Jesus sensed that his ministry was drawing to a close, and he feared that few if any would truly stick with him all the way to the end of his lonesome valley. At the beginning of the journey, it was not looking very promising at all.
Along the way, though, Jesus made some progress. He told some his greatest parables: the parables of the marriage feast, the great banquet, the dishonest steward, and the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the two lost sons, otherwise known as the prodigal son parable.
Then there is the curious story of the ten lepers whom Jesus healed. Only one of them, a Samaritan, came back to thank Jesus after he had been made them well. The story is found only in Luke. Is Luke telling his readers that Jesus was reaching out to everybody, not just to Jews, and not only to righteous Jews? It seems that way. A Samaritan was grateful to Jesus, whereas nine Jews didn’t even bother to thank him for healing them of their dreaded disease.
The last incident Luke reports before the Palm Sunday processional is the episode about Zaccheaus, the Jericho tax collector. The man was the first-century equivalent of a twenty-first century traitor who is paid to work with the Russians to throw a presidential election.
Jesus didn’t have to go to Jerusalem. Had he chosen to do so, he could have remained in the relative safety of the Galilee. But as he steadfastly went toward the holy city, he had dealings and conversations with people he knew his theological enemies would deeply resent. Yet he deliberately chose to reach out to these people. Jesus sought lost sheep; he always sought the kind of sheep who are lost.
Momentarily we shall be celebrating the sacrament of communion. The Upper Room and the Last Supper is where this journey is leading. The disciples will not really understand what Jesus’ words and actions meant in their last meal together. Afterward, perhaps long afterwards, looking back, they finally began to grasp what it all meant.
It was the end. But it also was the beginning. The season of Lent leads through a lonesome valley to the top of a hill called Golgatha, or, in Latin, Calvary. It was the way, and the only way, Jesus could go. He could not be Jesus, and choose the coward’s way out. Let us go with him.