Note: the video is longer than the audio as it includes a bit more than just the sermon proper.
This is the hinge of the gospel of Luke. To this point, Jesus has had a spectacular ministry career. He has established himself as a teacher who speaks with authority, he’s done spectacular miracles—everything is rolling along beautifully. And then, instead of capitalizing on his success as any smart preacher would, Jesus tossed it all aside and—as Rich Mullins put it—“set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem.” Everything that happens in Luke from now into chapter 19, in what’s commonly called the Travel Narrative, happens on the way to the cross.
This decision on Jesus’ part immediately starts to clarify two things. One, it forces others to make their own decision for or against him. There are huge crowds following Jesus not because Jesus but because, hey, free food, free miracles—you can’t beat it. That’s not the kind of follower he wants. Here he begins to drive the wedge between those who are willing to follow him as Lord and those who aren’t.
Two, this helps us see what truly matters and what doesn’t. Right off, we see that Jesus will not bend to cultural expectations. Between him and his goal lay Samaria, and the Jews despised the people of Samaria even more than the Samaritans despised them; but instead of taking the detour around Samaria, Jesus takes the direct route right through it. More than that, he reaches out to the Samaritans for hospitality. He doesn’t reject them—but the first village to which he sends his disciples rejects him. Why? “Because his face was set toward Jerusalem.” He wasn’t coming to them on their terms to support their agenda, so they wanted no part of him. Jesus accepts their rejection and moves on. He doesn’t judge them, because this isn’t the time for judgment. He also doesn’t accommodate them or try to change their minds. He lets them be, and refuses to let their opposition distract him from his proper task.
That said, even as Jesus remains unswervingly focused on Jerusalem, it’s clear the people he meets on the way do matter. He won’t let them sidetrack him or slow him down, but he doesn’t see them as interruptions, either. They are part of the purpose of his journey. As Brian Stelck put it in a chapel sermon during my time at Regent, ministry is what happens when you’re on the way to somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean Jesus makes the encounter easy or comfortable for any of them. Far from it. Jesus is unreasonable, on our terms, and what he asks of us is unreasonable. He intends to leave each one who encounters him with only two choices: all or nothing. Either build your life entirely on Jesus or build somewhere else altogether. He makes this painfully clear in these three encounters in verses 57-62.
His message to the first man is that following Jesus means abandoning our minimum standards. This guy volunteers in grandiose terms: “I will follow you wherever you go.” No limits, no exceptions, no fine print. Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will follow. But remember, Jesus is the rising star; if he’s heading to Jerusalem, it must be to figure out where he wants to plant his megachurch, and this guy probably figures he’s going along to head the building committee or lead the worship team. Would he have said “wherever you go” if he’d known Jesus had his GPS locked on Skull Hill? I doubt it.
So does Jesus. Instead of welcoming this guy aboard, he responds, “Foxes have their dens, and the birds of the air have roosts, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” It’s a powerful picture of poverty and rejection: even the animals and the birds have someplace to rest, but Jesus has nothing. This man would have to give up his social position and all assurance of comfort and safety for the uncomfortable, risky life of a vagabond.
This was inconceivable. People were saying this Jesus might be the long-awaited Messiah—the Messiah couldn’t be a homeless man, could he? But he had to be, for the reason Rich Mullins captured in his song “You Did Not Have a Home”: if he’d had a home, a wife, a job, he would have been part of the system. The world would have owned a piece of him, and that would have given it leverage. Instead, he was outside the economic and political system, a free radical with no handles for anyone to grab. The only thing the authorities could take from him was his life, and that was part of his plan. Jesus’ powerlessness was necessary to his power.
Luke doesn’t tell us how this would-be volunteer responded—he dumps the question in our laps, leaving us to wrestle with it while he moves on to the next encounter. It’s easy for us to tell ourselves we aren’t that guy, but we shouldn’t be so sure. This man had his expectations of God—what God should give him, what God could reasonably ask him to give up—and so do we. To tell Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go”—which is exactly the commitment he requires of us—means committing to follow him even if that means giving up everything, even if we get none of the rewards we want in return. It means letting go of our fallback plans and hanging on for dear life, accepting that we don’t get to decide where we end up. Or, for that matter, how we get there. Honestly, as stubborn and willfully obtuse as a lot of us are—at least, I’m assuming I’m not the only one in the room—we ought to fall on our faces in gratitude every morning that God isn’t giving us the Jonah treatment and making us travel by fish.
Now, whatever his warts and whatever his naïveté, the first guy is at least a willing volunteer. The second one isn’t—he’s a recruit, and he’s not really all that keen on the recruiter. That’s easy for us to miss, because to our Western ears his response seems fair: “OK, Jesus, but my dad’s funeral is this afternoon. Once we’re done at the graveside, I’ll catch up with you.” The thing is, that’s not actually what he’s saying.
At this point, I need to acknowledge one of the critical intellectual influences on my life, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth E. Bailey. To be ridiculously brief, Dr. Bailey was a Presbyterian missionary and New Testament scholar who spent decades writing about the Bible—mostly the gospels, particularly the parables—from inside a culture which was very close to Jesus’ own. His work is, I believe, indispensable. On this passage, he quotes an Egyptian Christian commentator named Ibrāhīm Sa‘īd who writes, “If his father had really died, why then was he not at that very moment keeping vigil over the body of his father? In reality he intends to defer the matter of following Jesus to a distant future when his father dies as an old man.” Dr. Bailey adds, “The phrase ‘to bury one’s father’ is a traditional idiom that refers specifically to the duty of the son to remain at home and care for his parents until they are laid to rest.”
In other words, however sincerely, this man is speaking as a respectful son and a responsible member of society. Remember, back then, retirement plans weren’t called IRAs and 401(k)s, they were called “children.” If he defaults on his duty to care for his parents in their old age, what happens? Well, they die of neglect unless—what would actually happen—the village takes on the responsibility of supporting them, which makes every other family in town poorer. Jesus knows this, and his recruit knows Jesus knows it. He tells Jesus, “Be reasonable.”
Jesus says—I’m paraphrasing here—“No.” The message to this man is that following Jesus means setting aside all the claims society makes on us. It means denying the expectations our society lays on us, even knowing full well that’s really going to honk a lot of people off. This is part of the subtext of this guy’s response: if he goes off with Jesus, he’ll probably never be able to go home again, because everyone in his village is going to spit at the mention of his name. They’re going to loathe and despise him for being selfish and irresponsible, and if he ever shows his face there again, they’re probably going to throw things at him until he goes away. Jesus says, “If you follow me instead of them, people will hate you for it. People you care about will hate you for it, and they’ll call you a hater. They’ll do much worse than that to you. Let them. Follow me anyway.”
The third encounter builds on the themes of the first two. This man presents himself as a volunteer, but he’s a fraud. You see, while his request is usually translated as “Let me go say goodbye,” what he actually says is, “Let me take leave,” and the difference is critical. In that culture, the one leaving would ask permission to go from those who were staying; this was “taking leave.” Those who were staying would say goodbye. Thus, for instance, a dinner guest who desired to go home would say, “With your permission?” The hosts would respond, “God go with you,” or, “May you go in peace,” or something else of that nature.
In other words, this guy says, “I’ll follow you, Lord—just as soon as I go home and get permission from my parents.” They of course will refuse to allow him to do any such crazy thing, so he can claim he wants to follow Jesus without actually having to, you know, follow Jesus. After all, his father’s authority over him was obviously higher than Jesus’ authority, so of course he would have to have his father’s permission to follow Jesus.
Jesus responds with a brief parable. Plowing was done with a light plow worked with the left hand. The right held the goad to keep the oxen moving; with the left, one kept the plow upright, held it at the proper depth, lifted it over stones in the field, and kept it straight. This took careful attention and skill lest the plow catch on a rock, cut back into previously-plowed ground (destroying work already done), or veer the other way, making the next furrows more difficult. A mistake could damage the field’s drainage or leave seeds exposed for birds to eat. Plowing required intense focus to work in harmony with the oxen, with the work already done, and with the work that remained to be done. A distracted plowman could not maintain this harmony, and in fact could destroy it, ruining an entire year’s work.
Jesus’ point is clear: following Jesus means following only Jesus. He calls for a single-minded, single-hearted commitment, with a single focus. He wants us to be all in, nothing less. As a lifelong Seattle sports fan, I can tell you the Seahawks have presented something of an acted parable on the importance of being all in, because that’s been Pete Carroll’s rallying cry since the day he took over the franchise. In 2013, the team was all in, and they won the Super Bowl. Over the years, as that commitment fractured and splintered, they went from Super Bowl champions to Super Bowl losers to out of the playoffs altogether, then dumped half their best players to try to make it possible to rebuild that commitment. If being single-minded and single-hearted matters in football, how much more in following Jesus?
The basis for that singular commitment is Jesus’ demand that we accept him as the only authority in our lives. In that culture, parental authority was absolute and family loyalty was of ultimate importance, so that’s where the challenge lay. Dr. Bailey recalls a class of Middle Eastern seminary students turning pale when they heard this passage preached and realized Jesus was claiming a higher authority than their fathers—the idea was that shocking and disturbing.
Our society looks to other authorities; if it recognizes any as absolute, it would probably be desire, especially sexual desire, because our culture believes our desires define our identity. The authority of our political tribes, our Red Tribe and our Blue Tribe, is right up there, too. We could go on. Jesus pulls rank on all of them. There’s no room for divided loyalties in the kingdom of God, and no other authorities for whom he will make allowances.
If we say, “Jesus, I’ll follow you, but not that far—I’d lose my job and go broke,” he says, “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head. You follow me.” If we say, “Jesus, I’ll follow you, but you have to be reasonable; if you ask me to do that, my parents will never speak to me again, I’ll offend all my family and lose all my friends,” he says, “Let the dead bury their dead. You go proclaim the kingdom of God.” If we say, “Jesus, I’ll follow you, but I’m not going to let go of this desire, or this plan, or this relationship—you’ll just have to be OK with it,” he says, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
That’s hard; but remember that Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, and think about what that means. We aren’t making a bargain that we’ll follow him if (fill in the blank). He calls us to follow him regardless, like sheep. Sheep are radical followers. They don’t try to navigate, or ask to take side trips; they don’t complain about what pasture they’re led to, or what water source; they don’t argue about what qualifies as food. Sheep trust that where and how the shepherd leads them is what’s best for them, even when that means going through narrow canyons black with shade. They trust the shepherd to want what’s best for them and to know what that is better than they do, and because of that, they follow wherever he leads. Jesus wants us to trust him like sheep. Is he good? Yes. Is it hard? Yes—but he is good. Will we suffer? Yes, sometimes—but he is good. Will the road be dark? Yes, for a while—but he is good. Will we get what we want out of life? Maybe not—but he is good. Will we face trials? Yes—but he is good. Will we have to walk the road alone? Never, because he is good. His demand that we follow him alone because he is God is, at bottom, an invitation to trust him above all others because he is good.
Photo © 2011 Joan Campderrós-i-Canas. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.