Luke 9:51-62 Commentary

These two discipleship scenarios are an interesting pair. On the one hand, the first scene depicts matters post-decision to follow Jesus. In the other, we have a series of stumbling blocks to saying yes. Going a little deeper than connecting them as discipleship stories, these two scenarios say something about how we are disciples of Christ.

While both scenes play out along the road, the first is given a more specific context: Samaria. You probably know that there was no love lost between the Jewish people and Samaritans, with each thinking of the other as heretics. Often, Jewish people heading to Jerusalem would choose to go around the area rather than go through it, as Jesus does here since he has “set his face toward Jerusalem.”

So when no hospitality is given them, it doesn’t seem too immoral to the sons of Thunder, James and John, to ask if they should call down some divine retribution. Not only do they have their cultural bias, they also have their missionary excursion in their recent past—in other words, they are riding the spiritual high of being used by God to cure diseases and work miracles and cast out demons. They know God’s power from heaven! (Luke 9.1-6)

That little taste of power doesn’t seem to have been rooted in them with its purpose. They have yet to understand how God’s power is meant to be used by God’s people: not in enacting revenge or in punishing one’s enemies, but in doing God’s good. Jesus rebukes them for this attitude—no small thing!

Being Jesus’s disciple isn’t about the power you get to wield over people, it’s about having the powerful presence of Christ within you, empowering you to be more and more like him. With Jesus’s face set toward Jerusalem, the disciples will soon see—even without fully understanding—how Jesus uses his power and how he treats those who reject him.

The other discipleship scenario doesn’t need to have a fixed place to give its meaning. In fact, being “along the road” is its own apt metaphor. In turn, Jesus does not abide any illusions of what discipling him will be like: it will be uncomfortable in this world.

Jesus’s first answer can be appropriately read in more than one way. Most assuredly, Jesus means that his disciples will not have a fixed home in the traditional sense. As they have followed him, they have travelled the region for three years, and soon, they will become apostles, “sent ones.” But the other sense is clear: nature is designed to give things a home, but in this world Jesus has been rejected because he is not of this world. Choosing to follow along means that we will suffer similar rejection, becoming out of step with the patterns of this world.

Disciples don’t style their lives in the way our cultures dictate. This message is seen even clearer in the next two scenarios, which are related by addressing clear cultural and family expectations. How literal we are meant to take these is questionable (hyperbole was a normal style of the time).

For instance, the first example is likely a lesson in how our cultural and religious values can keep us from the highest value: living for and with God. The unending gender roles contentions are perhaps a modern example of this, as it points to the way our sense of duty to Christ is warped by other forces. To bury one’s father in Jesus’s time and place was to honour and fulfill one’s duty—just as a mother might be told that her duty as a godly woman is in the home or a man might be told that his masculinity must look only like certain characteristics. Jesus’s call to discipleship leads us to question what has been passed down to us as “given.”

The next situation may highlight a similar familial responsibility or expectation, but I think that its purpose is to underscore a different common challenge to discipleship: delay. If we wait until everything is in its proper place or the conditions are just right, then we’ve lost the point. It will never be so; temptations and pressures will come and lessen our resolve. We will fall back into our old patterns if we do not start to take action with God.

Plus, thinking you have to set things in order before becoming more fully committed to Jesus gets the order of grace all wrong. And the fact of the matter is, the only place to get the conditions of our lives right so that we are free to be Jesus’s disciples is “along the road” with him. Those conditions—our lives—are a work in progress. So when Jesus says, “Follow me,” let’s go!

Textual Point

The fact that Jesus “set his face toward/to go to Jerusalem” is mentioned twice in these opening verses is noteworthy. It is early in the Gospel of Luke but we are already being reminded of where this road leads and what sort of sacrifice this discipleship will include: it isn’t just breaking customs and cultural norms, it’s your very self.

Illustration Idea

In a 2013 blog post titled “Hand to the Plow,” Sister M. Regina van den Berg of the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Martyr of St. George (Rome, Italy) explains the Catholic Church’s views on the consecrated life of religious orders. These words of Jesus are its inspiration. van den Berg writes about how nuns forsake all for the sake of Christ as a modern form of “putting one’s hand to the plow and not looking back.” Seeing her describe intentional choices that eschew our own values, like family and the use of modern forms of communication, can help us connect with how startling Jesus’s own words must have sounded two thousand years ago. We can’t all be nuns, but it’s worth wondering if the way we live our lives has any hint of the sacrifice necessary to devote ourselves to Christ.