Sermon delivered Sunday, June 30, 2013 (6 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 8), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Luke 9:51-62).
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear a series of exchanges between Jesus and three unnamed individuals who express a desire to follow him. Traditionally, these individuals have been called “would-be disciples,” because the assumption is that they did not ultimately decide to follow Jesus, but offered excuses rather than commitments when confronted with the demands of discipleship.
But the text doesn’t actually tell us what the motivations of these individuals were – we don’t know for sure that their statements were “excuses” – and we don’t know how they responded to Jesus’s words to them.
We do hear about the response of “would-be disciples” in other parts of the Gospels, like the man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-27, Luke 18:18-27). Jesus told him that even though he had kept all the commandments, he lacked one thing – to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor and then come and follow Jesus. This story, which appears both in Mark and in Luke, does tell us about the man’s response: “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22). It is clear in the story that the man left, that he did not immediately leave everything to follow Jesus. But the text doesn’t tell us anything about the responses of the individuals we hear about today. Matthew’s Gospel includes an account of two of the three individuals we hear about in Luke, but it does not give us any detail about their responses either.
The fact that the writers of the Gospels did not tell us anything about the motivations of these individuals nor about how they responded to Jesus’s statements leads me to think that the significance in this passage is not in what those individuals did or didn’t do, but in the words that Jesus said to them. In including these brief exchanges between Jesus and several unnamed individuals, the Gospel writers were preserving sayings of Jesus that they felt were important to his message and that they wanted to pass on to future generations. The point was not to judge the motivations or intentions of the so-called “would-be disciples,” but to impress upon the reader or hearer of the Gospel texts the cost and demand that following Jesus would place on their own lives. The question is not, “What did those three individuals do?” but, “What will you do?” Not, “Were they ready to be committed followers of Christ?” but “Are you ready to be committed followers of Christ?”
Each of these three statements, isolated as they are as pithy one-liners, tell us something about the cost and demand of following Jesus. The first statement, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” alludes to the itinerancy of Jesus’s ministry; he traveled from place to place, always on the move as he brought his message to more and more people in the region. Contrary to some interpretations, this statement probably does not indicate that Jesus was literally “homeless,” since other passages of Scripture indicate that he had a home in Capernaum (see Matthew 4:13, Mark 2:1-2) [1], but it does indicate that following Jesus will not lend itself to a comfortable, stable life. For the earliest followers of Jesus, making a commitment to follow him meant sacrificing time at home with family for time spent on the road. In our own day, touring musicians or authors, business travelers, and deployed military personnel know the personal sacrifice that such travel requires. In the first century, being a follower of Jesus was not a job for the homebody!
In our current context, the lifestyle for most Christians has changed dramatically. No longer is it expected that we leave home or family to follow Jesus; in fact, it is often assumed that establishing a stable home and family is one of the most important things a Christian could do. In the United States, following Jesus does not even require leaving our neighborhood, since there are a plethora of churches available to meet our spiritual needs within walking or short driving distance of our homes. For most of us, becoming a follower of Jesus does not require giving up any material or interpersonal comforts in the way that it did for the first disciples. But throughout the ages, Christians have continued to hear the call to leave the comfortable and familiar and risk a life of constant movement and itinerant ministry in order to serve Christ and share the Gospel. The lives of missionaries and others who have followed this path remain for us an icon of that call to give up material stability that God may still issue to any of us today. As we consider Jesus’s response to the first individual who says he will follow Jesus wherever he goes, we must ask ourselves: If following Jesus meant that we would have nowhere to lay our heads, that we would have to give up the stability and comfort of our homes, would we be wiling to follow Jesus wherever he went?
The second statement, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” has long been a subject of discussion and debate among commentators and scholars. How is it that Jesus could be so seemingly harsh and dismissive of the grief of a man who had lost his father? Isn’t it rather unforgiving and cruel not to allow this man the time to go home and take care of the things required of him by Jewish law and custom? First, it is highly unlikely that this man would be out walking the streets if his father had just died. Traditional first-century Jewish practice was to bury someone the same day that they died, and then not leave the home for seven days during the time of prescribed mourning, called shivah. So, if this man is out walking the streets of society, his father is either not dead yet, as some commentators have suggested, or his father’s body has already been placed in the family tomb but has not undergone the secondary burial that many Jewish families practiced, which involved placing the bones of the deceased in an ossuary a year after their death and burial. This was the final step in the burial practice, and marked the official end of the mourning period for the children of the deceased. [2] If this is what the man refers to when he asks to first go and bury his father, he is asking for a delay of a certain amount of time before he comes to follow Jesus – anywhere between a few weeks to eleven months, depending on how recently his father had died.
In any case, the key request of the man is time – he is willing to follow Jesus, but not immediately – he first needs time to tend to some important family obligations that would have been respected as sacred by any devout Jew. Jesus’s refusal to grant him this time comes not out of disrespect for those traditions, but out of a sense that there is no time. Remember, the beginning of our Gospel passage today tells us that “the days [had drawn] near for Jesus to be taken up,” and “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. If this man waits to follow him for several months or a year, it will likely be too late – Jesus will already be gone from this world. Given the urgency of the moment, even the most sacred family obligations must be neglected if this man is to join the movement. The teachings of the Apostle Paul and other early church leaders about preferring the single life over marriage came out of a similar sense that time was of the essence. They believed that Jesus’s death and resurrection had ushered in the “last days,” and that Jesus would return very soon for the final judgment of the world, so it didn’t make sense to pursue relationships and marriage – but to stay in whatever state one was in – married or single – and focus one’s attention on preparing for the immanent Second Coming.
As twenty-first century Christians, we no longer feel this urgency about the impending end of time as the earliest Christians did, and thus our understanding of what is most important in our life together has changed. We have moved out of “emergency mode” into stability. But Jesus’s response to the man who asks for time to tend to his family obligations encourages us to ask ourselves: If time was of the essence and we were in “emergency mode,” where would our deepest loyalties lie? If necessary, would we be willing to neglect even our most important family obligations in order to follow Christ?
Jesus’s third statement, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” tells us that following Jesus requires total focus and commitment. Again, the sense of urgency and lack of time explains Jesus’s rejection of the man’s request to go home and say goodbye to his family. In order to be ready to follow Christ, we must be entirely forward-looking, not caught up in the past or what our lives were like before we met him. Just as most of us could not drive forward in a straight line if we were turned around looking out of our back window, so a farmer cannot plow a straight line if he is looking behind him instead of forward. In order to do a proper job plowing the field, the farmer must be focused forward, looking ahead of him, not behind, and concentrating solely on his task in the present moment. Jesus’s words invite us to consider: Are we able to be completely focused on the task of following Christ in the present moment? Do we ever “look back” to our past in a way that hinders our ability to effectively do the work Christ has called us to do?
Jesus’s words to these three unnamed men remind us of the cost of discipleship, that following Jesus requires a willingness to choose him over all else. To those who desire to follow him, Jesus asks the same question he asked James and John when they wanted to be close to him, to sit next to him “in his glory”: “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). In other words, “Are you sure you want to do this? It won’t be comfortable and it won’t be pretty. We’re headed to Jerusalem. The road is hard and it leads to death.”
Those of us who are indeed baptized with the baptism of Christ are baptized into his death, as the Apostle Paul said (Romans 6:3). But the good news is that we are also baptized into his Resurrection. In baptism, we are united with Christ’s very body (Galatians 3:27), so that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The high cost and demand of discipleship is possible only if we recognize that it is not our ministry, but Christ’s ministry working through us. What discipleship requires, then, is a willingness to surrender, to “let go and let God,” as the saying goes, to allow Christ to live in us and work through us, and then, when the time comes for us to make whatever sacrifice we are asked to make in our journey of faith, we can say with full confidence, “We will, with God’s help.”
[1] For more on the argument that Jesus was not “homeless,” see Dave Barnhart, “Why Jesus Wasn’t Homeless (And Why It Matters),” posted on May 13, 2013 at Ministry Matters: http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/article/entry/3933/why-jesus-wasnt-homeless-and-why-it-matters#axzz2XM2DohAv
[2] For more on secondary burial customs, see Byron R. McCane (Duke University), “‘Let the dead bury their own dead’: Secondary Burial and Matt. 8:21-22,” Harvard Theological Review 83:1 (Jan 1990), 31-43.
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