THE JESUS ROAD

Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62]

When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. [Luke 9:51]

Hearing today’s gospel lesson and musing about it as I do, various pieces of music come to mind that form a kind of soundtrack to the narrative.  For instance, at the very first sentence of our reading – the one about Jesus setting his face to go to Jerusalem, I can’t help but hear Willie Nelson singing his famous “On the Road Again”.  At these opening words of our gospel, St. Luke begins a new and dramatic storyline that scholars have dubbed as his “travel narrative”.1  What better background music to emphasize the point of Jesus traveling to the Holy City than Willie’s musical alert: “On the Road Again”?  Whether it’s a summer vacation trip or some version of a college road trip, being “on the road again” points to the reality and presence of movement and of the prospect of change.  The change could be an adventure; it could also be a sign of something new emerging.  In any event, being “on the road again” almost always indicates a shift from the routine to a more purposed point.

So it is that when Luke informs us that “when the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up” [9:51] we should ask, “Where’s he going?”  Luke immediately answers that the Lord is going to Jerusalem, but why Jerusalem?  Again, what Luke tells us should start to make us put two and two together, and it is his choice of words that should tip us off.  The phrase Luke uses to give us the reason Jesus unflinchingly heads to Jerusalem is (in English) “taken up” but actually and formally the phrase more accurately is translated as Jesus’ “Exodus”.

One contemporary rendering of this passage puts it this way: When it came close to the time for his Ascension [that is, for Jesus’ “Exodus”, his deliverance] [Jesus] gathered up his courage and steeled himself for the journey to Jerusalem.2  We should not need a GPS or a travelogue to get this “Exodus” point.  For we know that it is Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension which comprise the ultimate “Exodus”, the ultimate act by which God delivers all God’s people from fear and death into new life and freedom.

However, given this, Jesus setting his face to go to Jerusalem demands more than a trip planner or Willie Nelson’s song.  In fact, the focus at this early stage of Jesus’ traveling is not really on Jesus at all but on the significance of following him.  So, with Willie’s song in the background, let’s pay attention to what happens on the road with Jesus.

As you may have noticed, this first part of the road trip has two revealing episodes, two “pit stops” to it, both of which seem to indicate a bumpy trip to come.

The first “pitstop” takes place as Jesus and his followers go through a Samaritan village.  They are looking for a place to bed down for the night; but no one in the village would receive them as guests or even as paying customers precisely because Jesus and the boys were Headed for Jerusalem.  Like the Hatfields and McCoys, Jews and Samaritans were old and bitter enemies.  Like oil and water, they didn’t mix well at all.  I encourage you to “google” “Samaritan” when you get home to perceive what appears to be inhospitality to strangers but is actually rooted in a much deeper antipathy that includes history, tribal identity, and severe religious differences.

Nonetheless, what is telling about the story Luke portrays quickly focuses on James and John, two members of Jesus’ inner disciple circle.  “The Sons of Thunder” (as Jesus named them for their frequent and impulsive perspective and behavior) – James and John (as if on cue) self-righteously erupt at the Samaritans’ disrespectful snub, pretentiously asking Jesus if they can call some heavily-armed drones down on these alien yahoos.  Luke, ever the careful editor, sparsely reports that Jesus simply rebuked them and their plan and went on to the next village.

This potentially explosive scene reminds me of the James and John Zebedee that reside in me and causes me to pray the part of Psalm 51 that serves as an antidote to such rage.  The prayerful petition is: “Create in me and clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me”.3  I pray this because (as with James and John) when I am faced with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, the temptation to self-righteousness (that is, to do my will with thoughts of using the proverbial “terribly swift sword” to act on my will) threaten to flood my heart and mind.  The prayer mitigates against such potentially destructive impulses and calls me back from the abyss.  But clearly the specific point lies in Jesus abruptly rebuking this self-centered willfulness.  It is not what followers of God’s Christ are called to be about.

With some sense of relief from this tension (both in the story and in my own soul), Luke shuttles us directly on to describe the second episode in this early part of the road trip with Jesus.  He writes: As they were going along the road [9:57].  Presumably to the next Samaritan town to find some accommodation, , a young fellow hollered out to Jesus, “I will follow you… wherever you go.”  At this point, I can hear the gospel scene’s background music change, and what I hear comes from that wonderfully silly movie, starring Whoopie Goldberg, Sister Act.

Remember the character Whoopie Goldberg plays?  She is a night-club singer working in a mob club.  In danger of being the target of retribution by the club’s hit men, she holes up in a convent full of sequestered nuns as a way to elude capture.  Fast forward the plot, “Sister Mary Clarence” (aka. the club singer, “Deloris Van Cartier”), employing her street hutzpah, ironically starts to rejuvenate the moribund convent, specifically with her take on liturgical music.  The most famous example of these offerings came when with great vigor the nuns’ choir had the honor of singing before the Pope.  Updating the 1963 pop hit from Little Peggy March, they sang “I Will Follow Him”.  Of course, the “him” in this case, was Jesus.

“I love him, I love him, I love him; and where he goes I’ll follow; I’ll follow; I’ll follow.  I will follow him…”

With this background music’s assistance, the stage is set to identify the gospel’s second episode.  Quickly and in succession, we meet three individuals who (in their own way) sing to Jesus about their desire to follow him – “wherever he may go...”

In response to the open-ended sounding proclamation of the first seeker, Jesus warns that the “wherever” to which this man is willing to go in following Jesus requires much more than being a good traveler who can pack light.  Then, to the second potential candidate for discipleship, Jesus actually asks him to join the Twelve, but this one’s response is to request time to tend to his father’s death.  Now here, we need to pause the music and the story in order to pay more attention to what this encounter reveals about following Jesus.

To a practicing Jew, there is no more pressing obligation than to honor father and mother and, in particular, to attend to the burial of one’s father.  So it is that when the one who asked for the dispensation to bury his father, we need to note this motivation is not a bad, indifferent, or superficial thing.  Yet this grieving son truly was committed to the hard and faithful task of burying his dad.  Nonetheless, Jesus’ response, sounding rather coldly unsympathetic and very “unwoke”, directed the seeker to allow “the dead to bury the dead and apparently left him (and us) to ponder that moral enigma of what comprises “first things first”.

With the Sister Act nun’s “Follow him” music turned back on, Jesus meets a third person, who also desires to “follow him”, but first this would-be-seeker needs to say “goodbye” to his parents: another example of obeying the fifth of the Ten Commandments.  Yet again, Jesus says to this one that anyone who plows the field and looks back will not plow straight rows, which is the point of plowing the fields in the first place.  Reminiscent of St. Paul’s later echoing of Jesus’ point (in Paul’s “Letter to the Philippians”-- 3:13-14), the Apostle proclaims his discipleship’s clarity: “…forgetting what lies behind, I press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

So it is that “Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem…”  Priorities.  First things first.  At this crossroads of the cross, Jesus’ “Exodus” awaits completion – once and for all.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor, who in 1937 wrote a book, entitled, “The Cost of Discipleship”.  He wrote the book and gave his own response to the book’s title by returning from his American academic post to face the emerging reality of Nazism in Germany.  The book, which is still widely read and referred to, is centered on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and in that work and in that dangerous time, Bonhoeffer spells out what he believes it means to follow Christ.  As I said, he chose to personify the “Cost of Discipleship” in his resistance to Hitler.  For his faithfully defiant witness, he was arrested and executed weeks before the war ended in Europe.

Sometimes the cost of following Jesus reaches this extreme level.  Nonetheless, witnessing to Christ and the God-life in our midst inevitably requires dying in small ways to the wants of the self in small ways and sometimes in great ways.  This is what Jesus is saying as he journeys to his “Exodus” in Jerusalem.

On several occasions in the past weeks, I have mentioned being a witness for life on God’s terms, and it has been through the politics of our time (both in our country and in the world at large) that I have encountered the fact that for most of us middle-to-upper-middle class Americans, we are not used to paying the “cost of discipleship”.  This is so because we have relied on the premise that we live in a “Christian” nation and thought we were being subsidized by a “Christian” culture.  But this a false attitude, one that has led to Christ’s cross and resurrection being prostituted and monetized by the idolatrous propagation of what is called “Christian Nationalism”: a distortion of Jesus’ life and revelation that grabs for power and not the service of following the Lord.

In the midst of all that is clearly not of God’s will – no matter how the false prophets among us clamor that they alone possess that will – the unavoidable question is to ask: to what extent can we -- will we -- witness not only to the standards of the Law (that is, to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor) but more specifically to the standards of our Baptismal vows?

The question before us all then is: Will we walk with Jesus and follow him beyond what is familiar and comfortable for us?   Perhaps a less foreboding form of the question is this: In what ways is God active in your life and calling you to follow Jesus?

Reflecting and praying for clarity on this question is a good summer’s spiritual discipline: One we will return to come September and see where we are.  Amen.

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1. Andrew McGowen. Andrew’s Version: “Following the Prophet to Jerusalem”. 6/24/25

2.  Luke 9:51 --The Message

3.  Psalm 51:11