On turning toward Jerusalem

Luke 9:51-62 Pentecost 3

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

The Gospel of Luke opens with Jerusalem and the temple as the centre and the pinnacle of the world (Luke 4:9). It is in Jerusalem and the temple that Jesus becomes who he is: a firstborn male designated as holy to the Lord (Luke 2:22-38).Jerusalem and the temple are also the places that shape who Jesus is becoming, the places he is reluctant to leave, the place where he belongs (Luke 2:41-52).

Of course, that is the case. Jerusalem is Zion, the City of David, the city on the hill, the repository of a nation’s culture, the holder of the nation’s hopes, the place of beginnings, the place where identities are created.

And Jesus and his band of disciples are on their way there. They are going to where God is, to the centre of the world.

And surely, the closer they get to the centre of everything, the more power and righteousness they amass and experience: They are travelling with the Messiah of God! (Luke 9:20). They are companions of the one who will bring liberation and reorder the world (Luke 4:18-19). Certain of their righteousness, they can command fire to come down from heaven against any who would thwart their holy crusade.

Those attracted to the Jesus movement also know the excitement of proximity to power. And, sure of who they are, certain of how the world is, they are confident in their decision-making powers and their abilities to prioritise: first, let me go and bury my father; let me first say farewell to those at my home.

For Jesus, however, the journey to Jerusalem is no pilgrimage of power. From the very beginning of his public ministry, the teachers with whom he conversed as a boy hounded him with criticism and accusations (Luke 5:21, 30, 6:2, 7, 11, 7:30, 39). The closer he gets to Jerusalem, the more danger he is in: The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes (Luke 9:21).

Jesus has to set his face in order to go to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, for Jesus, will not be the place that welcomes him into its arms as Simeon did at his birth (Luke 2:28). It will not be the place where the teachers will be amazed at his understanding (Luke 2:47).

Jerusalem will be the place of his exodus/departure, the place where prophets are killed, the place of desolation (Luke 9:31, 13:33-34, 21:20-21). Jerusalem, the place of salvation, will become the place of weeping (Luke 2:30-32, 23:28). The place not of order but of disorder, not of creation but of destruction. The place of death, not life.

But death is the reality that we all face. And it is the reality that the disciples and would-be disciples seek to avoid.

If Jerusalem is the place of reality, then the villages Jesus and his companions pass through are the places of unreality, almost reality or pseudo-reality.

In pseudo-reality, things are almost or partially true. At first glance or at the surface, they can seem genuine and real. It is true that individuals have power and agency, but the power to command fire to come down from heaven is an abomination, a distortion of truth and reality. It is true that we owe respect and kindness to family—we indeed have familial responsibilities. However, if those duties are used in a sleight of hand to avoid facing profound existential responsibilities, they become pseudo-truth.

While we cannot be certain of all that Jesus meant when he used the term kingdom of God, what he says about it represents a radically different understanding and experience of reality. The kingdom of God reflects the world as it is in its creational, fundamental truth—the always and everywhere, universal reality. The kingdom of God is good news for, and belongs to, the poor; a fundamental, un-hierarchical reordering, restoration and re-creation of the world. (Luke 1:33, 4:43, 6:10, 7:28).

The kingdom of God, as Jesus portrays it up until this point in Luke’s Gospel, is decidedly not a neat set of individualised, religious, siloed—off beliefs. It is not something to be considered among a plethora of responsibilities. Prioritising a list of responsibilities (first let me… let me first…) that includes the kingdom of God is making a category error. It is like saying, ‘I must visit family, I must attend to a funeral, I must breathe, I have to defend the honour and reputation of our group, I have to go on a great adventure.’ One of these things is not the same. One of these things is an existentially essential reality of all life. The others are responsibilities only within reality.

The road to the true reality of the universe, to the kingdom of God, goes not through the pseudo-reality of the villages where life is fought for and clung to but through the true reality of the city; Jerusalem, the place that ought to be the centre of life but is now the heart of death. Death cannot be made first or last; it can only be faced in all its existential truth.

With a face set to go to Jerusalem, Jesus encounters one who announces: I will follow you wherever you go. Surely, this is the epitome of discipleship, following without question! But this is not reality. The often difficult and complex work of decision-making is central to our created nature (Genesis 2:19). We cannot abandon our agency to another and retain our true humanity.

Jesus rejects this one’s desire to lay down the burdens of humanness and have others make all the decisions. Instead, he reminds this one—and any who are seduced by simplicity—of how complex reality is: Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests. There is a natural, created order where life is governed by instinct, unburdened by thinking and decision-making, but the Son of Man, the Human One, is of a different order of being. The Human One—all human ones—are present in the world in all the glory, complexity, and pain of self-awareness, autonomy, and agency: the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. There is no straightforward or obvious place that is home for humans. We do not lie down according to instinct, it is all so much more complex than that, we must constantly consider how and where we will lay our heads.

However, Jesus’s response to the would-be disciple goes further. He isn’t just making a distinction between the instincts of other creatures and human responsibility; he says the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Once the new, true reality of the world—the kingdom of God—is experienced, anywhere that might have previously sufficed as a place to layour heads no longer does. Every place, every pseudo-village, is a pale, broken imitation of what it was created to be. Every place, truly seen, is a place in need of liberation, and until it experiences liberation from the oppression of its falseness, the Son of Man and his disciples will have nowhere to lay their heads.

Jesus’s call to discipleship is a call to stand up and face reality in all its existential brokenness, pain, and confusion, and in all its glorious wonder and hope.