Readings:
- 1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21
Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11 Response: “You are my inheritance, O Lord.” - Galatians 5:1-13-18
- Luke 9:51-62
Reflections on the Gospel Reading
This Sunday we skip Luke’s account of the Transfiguration (the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent) and take up the reading at the point where Luke introduces Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. Thus far Luke has been following the general order of Mark’s Gospel. Now he departs from it and uses the literary device of a journey to Jerusalem, mostly as a setting for sayings of Jesus that are found only in Luke’s Gospel or found also in Matthew’s Gospel but in different contexts.
Luke’s journey theme has profoundly influenced subsequent Christianity down to our day. We talk about the journey of faith and about the Church as a pilgrim people journeying to the Heavenly Jerusalem.
In The First Testament there are contrasting images of God. On the one hand, God is enthroned in the Temple and holds sway in the Land of Israel. On the other hand, God dwells in a tent and travels with the People of Israel through the wilderness. God is present everywhere, even among the exiles in Babylonia who long to return to Jerusalem and the Promised Land. Luke’s Jesus likewise is on a journey.
For Luke Jerusalem is the city of destiny. It is the place where Jesus will be taken up by God (a reference to what we call the Ascension even though Luke never uses that word). His Gospel begins and ends in Jerusalem. In his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke traces the gospel message as it goes out from Jerusalem to Rome, the center of the known civilized world.
The Messengers
Today’s gospel reading, taken from the very beginning of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, contains some important lessons for those of us who aspire to be followers of Jesus. The first episode, found only in Luke’s Gospel, is about the messengers (Greek “angels”) who go before Jesus as his “advance people” to arrange hospitality. Luke views them from the perspective of the later Jesus movement where itinerant missionaries depended on the hospitality of believers, or at least of sympathetic listeners. In Luke’s view, just as messengers (angels) went before Jesus to announce his imminent arrival in Jerusalem, so also early Christian missionaries went throughout the world announcing the coming of God and Jesus to the whole world.
In retrospect, we know from the phenomenal expansion of the Jesus movement that many people embraced that message. However, the gospel sources indicate that the messengers, like Jesus, also met hostility and persecution. In today’s reading Jesus gives his disciples a lesson on how to handle rejection.
There is a tendency among enthusiasts to anticipate God’s condemnation on those who reject their message. James and John, presumably two of the messengers, want to take a page from the story of Elijah in the Second Book of Kings. There, Elijah calls down fire from heaven to kill the messengers of the wicked King Ahaziah. (2 Kings 1.10, 12) James and John figure that Jesus is at least as great as Elijah, and that this will be a lesson to the inhospitable Samaritans.
By narrating Jesus’ rebuke of James and John, Luke indicates something about his view of Jesus. Jesus is not an agent of destruction but of healing. Although he is proclaiming the nearness of God’s reign which has overtones of judgment and condemnation, he is also announcing a period of grace, a time to get one’s house in order. Luke clearly distances himself from those who would apply a violent image of Elijah to Jesus, even though, as we shall see, Luke’s Jesus is much more demanding of his followers than Elijah was. We who would be followers of Jesus would do well to learn this lesson: Violence and fear do not engender loyalty to Jesus. Rather, the gospel is a message of healing and hope.
Would-be Followers of Jesus
In the second part of today’s gospel reading Luke groups together three sayings of Jesus preserved in his sources. Scholars are not certain about the context in the life of Jesus that gave rise to these sayings, either individually or collectively. For example, we are not at all certain what event or circumstance prompted Jesus to say, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” It might have been a traditional saying that he used to illustrate some aspect of the Reign of God. Luke takes these three sayings and uses them to teach a lesson to his readers by making them responses of Jesus to the declarations of three anonymous would-be followers.
The first saying: “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” (See also Matthew 18.20)
Whatever the original context of this saying during the life of Jesus, Luke uses it to illustrate one of the conditions of discipleship – homelessness. Having no home of their own, followers of Jesus will have to depend on the hospitality of others. As we have seen in the first part of today’s reading, that hospitality was not always forthcoming. Followers of Jesus had to be willing to give up the security of a familiar location and close family ties. Eugene LaVerdiere puts it well. “Those who wish to join Jesus [on his journey] must disengage themselves from any earthly home, from former responsibilities, and from past relationships.” (LaVerdiere 1990, 144)
In our mobile society, it is hard for us to imagine the high value ancient societies placed on stability. In the Palestine of Jesus’ time 95 percent of the people lived close to the land in tiny agricultural communities. The ideal was to stay put. Family and land were literally the source of life, identity, and self-worth.
Conversely, in the honor-based culture of the biblical world a wandering lifestyle was considered shameful. A man’s primary allegiance was to his family and relatives. A man who wandered from home was not around to protect and defend his wife and children and to ensure the legitimacy of his offspring. A peasant who had lost his land might be forced into such a life, for example by becoming an itinerant construction woodworker such as Jesus was, but nobody in their right mind would choose such a life.
Yet, by placing Jesus’ saying about the foxes and the birds in this context, Luke shows us how he understands the call to discipleship. Jesus has no stable home. Those who follow him must break away from ties to family, land, and location.
The second saying: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” (See also Matthew 18.22.)
In today’s first reading from the First Book of Kings, Elijah lets Elisha “kiss his father and mother goodbye” before following him. In stark actions that illustrated the depth of his commitment to the prophetic call, Elisha chopped up his wooden plow for firewood, slaughtered the two oxen, and boiled the animals for a family feast. It is hard to imagine a more definite break with the past. Yet, Luke’s Jesus requires even more.
It is also hard to imagine a duty more sacred than burying one’s father. Yet, even this has to be set aside by one who is called to proclaim the kingdom of God. True, it was not a question of the immediate burial, which usually occurred before sundown. The reference is probably to the sometimes-elaborate rituals during the year after one’s father’s death, culminating in the transfer of his bones to an ossuary or bone-box for permanent burial. (See Corley 2002, 79-139; Malina and Rohrbaugh 2003, 347-348.)
The third saying: “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”
In the third saying, which is peculiar to his Gospel, Luke once again contrasts Jesus to the Prophet Elijah by comparing the would-be follower of Jesus to Elisha, the disciple of Elijah. Taking up the plowing metaphor, Jesus declares that the imminence of God’s Reign requires immediate action and a laser-like focus on one’s goal. There is no turning back.
There is no doubt that Luke saw the commitment to be a follower of Jesus in very radical terms. It is mitigated somewhat by the praise he heaps on the people, presumably sedentary, who offer hospitality to itinerant prophets (See, for example, Luke 10.1-12; Matthew 10.40-42.), but it still demands absolute allegiance to Jesus and relativizes all family ties.
The Cost of Discipleship
How does Luke’s view of the commitment necessary to be a follower of Jesus translate to our twenty-first century individualistic, mobile, technological culture? How do the words of Jesus apply to a culture in which stability in one’s home location and incredibly close family ties are no longer the supreme values? Men and women are gone from the home for many hours each day without being considered bad parents or poor spouses. Whole families move from coast to coast to respond to better employment opportunities. We presume that adult children will leave home and establish their own independent families, often at great distance from their parents’ home. All this would have been incomprehensible to Jesus’ listeners.
Today’s Gospel challenges us to examine our attachments, our taken-for-granted values. Perhaps, if Jesus were alive today he very well might criticize our mobility and rootlessness, instead of the stable features of our lives. Jesus’ critique of his culture and religious practices does not necessarily apply to our vastly different cultural circumstances. His words need to be translated to apply to our times.
Could it be that through the gospel proclamation God is calling us to renounce once and for all a lifestyle of acquisitiveness in favor of a radically simplified way of living based on sharing? In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke describes the early community as follows: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all as they had need.” (Acts 2.44-45)
Is this communitarian (even communistic) living arrangement merely an idealistic memory of Luke’s community, exaggerated by looking back through the rose-colored lenses of some fifty years? Or is it still today a goal that each follower of Jesus should strive for? Or is this communitarian vision now a command just for women and men in religious orders, while the rest of us extend hospitality to these contemporary “super” Christians?
The answers to these unsettling questions are not easy to face. However, as long as people read Luke’s Gospel the questions will not go away.
Explanatory Notes:
The First Testament “The First Testament” is an alternative expression for “The Old Testament” or “The Hebrew Bible.” Unfortunately today, for many “The Old Testament” has a negative connotation of being secondary or outmoded. On the other hand, “The Hebrew Bible” does not include a number of books that the early Church considered to be inspired. “The First Testament” refers both to the sacred books written in Hebrew or Aramaic (“The Hebrew Bible”) and to the slightly larger collection translated into or originally written in Greek (“The Septuagint”). Israelites in the Diaspora (that is, in the Greek speaking world outside of the Land of Israel) used this latter collection of sacred books as their Bible at the time the Gospels were being written.
Samaritans “The origins of the Samaritans can be traced to 722 B.C., when the Northern Kingdom (Samaria) was conquered by the Assyrians. The king of Assyria brought immigrants from foreign lands to live in Samaria, and over time this mixed group of inhabitants worshiped foreign gods as well as YHWH. In the eyes of the Jewish people they departed from Jewish customs and sensibilities regarding the law (2Kings 17:24-41). Rejecting the Hebrew Bible as a whole, their only Scriptures were a particular redaction of the Five Books of Moses, the ‘Samaritan Pentateuch.’ Furthermore, they had their own temple at Gerizim (John 4:9). The Samaritans were typically regarded as Gentiles, or at best a degree nearer than Gentiles, but not as full members of the House of Israel. Although a sizeable number of Samaritans (possibly more than 100,000) lived between Galilee in the north and Judea in the south at the time of Jesus, today they are nearly extinct. It has been estimated that some 250 live in or around Nablus and another 250 at Holon near Tel Aviv.” (Hultgren 2000, p. 98)
In preparing these reflections, in addition to the biblical texts, I consulted the following works:
Corley 2002 – Kathleen E. Corley, Women and the Historical Jesus: Feminist Myths of Christian Origins (Santa Rosa [CA]: Polebridge Press, 2002), pp. 79-139.
Cousar et al. 1994 – Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, J. Clinton McCann, Jr., James D. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV, Year C. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), pp. 408-410.
Fitzmyer 1981 – Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981), pp. 823-837.
Fuller 1984 – Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary. The Word of God for the Church Today (Collegeville [MN]: Liturgical Press, 1984), pp. 480-482.
Johnson, L. T. 1991 – Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina Series Volume 3, A Michael Glazier Book (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991), pp. 161-165.
LaVerdiere 1990 – Eugene, LaVerdiere, S.S.S., Luke. New Testament Message, Volume 5. A Michael Glazier Book (Collegeville [MN]: Liturgical Press, 1990), pp. 141-145.