Text of a Sermon Pentecost 3 Year C Luke 9.51-62
“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” .
Jesus, knowing the time is approaching for the fulfilment of his destiny, does not shy away from this knowledge. He embraces it. He sets his face, determinedly and resolutely towards it.
Jerusalem is where it all started with the annunciation to Zechariah in the temple, with the prediction of Simeon on the life of Jesus, and with Jesus’s own teaching in the temple when he was 12.
Jerusalem, is the city of the Messiah, and so Jesus, having been recognized as the Messiah earlier in the Gospel has to visit, has to enter the Holy City – no matter what comes about; Jerusalem is where it will all be resolved. Death or life, Jesus, sets his face towards his fate and calls his disciples, calls us today, to do the same.
Many commentaries on today’s gospel include the same word: ‘difficult’; difficult to follow the unrelenting call that Christ makes to his disciples: leaving the dead to bury the dead, rejecting the love of family and never turning back towards our old lives.
Christ’s call, it is argued, is costly and requires our singular devotion to God. Only then, with this singular devotion, can we overcome the difficulties of discipleship and give our lives fully to God, placing God above even our economic security, our social duty and even above our for love for family and friends. This is difficult. This is hard, almost harsh.
A key that might help resolve the apparent tension and harshness is that God has given us our lives. Our lives are not actually our own, though it seems like they are, because God is the cause of all creation, including our own.
It is probably easier to accept this on a generic rather than a specific level. As we hear in Genesis, God, the divine creator, creates all things. This makes sense on the universal level. But does God also create our specific lives? Our personal, wonderful, messy, glorious lives – and the life of everyone, and the life every creature? Yes, our tradition and faith assert, everyone and everything at every moment.
Mary Oliver in her poem ‘The Summer Day’ makes clear this connection between the universal and the particular:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand
Every unique grasshopper. Every unique blade of grass. Ever grain of sugar. Every unique person, all exist because God causes them to exist. Theologically, God as the source of all being, not as a discreet entity or a being Herself, but AS BEING ITSELF, God as being donates being to our lives. Through this ever-present donation of being we be, we are, we live and move.
Our entire life is a gift from God, given so that we are able to give our lives completely and unreservedly to Her. This is the purpose of our lives. This is why we are created and why we be.
This is why the singular devotion demanded by Christ, is possible – it is who we were created to be. It’s in the very fabric of our being, because we are, because we receive donated being from God.
And Christ, being fully God, also donates his being to us. He donates to our being the setting of his face to Jerusalem, donates to our being the full and glorious truth of life, death, and resurrection. Through this donated being, we can be as Christ is.
This means we can fully respond to God’s love with singular devotion. So, when God as Christ calls us above all else, he is calling us to do nothing more and nothing less than what we were created to do, what is in our being, because our being is donated to us from him.
And yet … when we contemplate the examples of costly discipleship today – possible homelessness, not burying our parents and disconnection from family – following Jesus can still seem not only very difficult but also very harsh.
But as Christians we have already made the decision to follow Jesus. We have already, through our baptism, surrendered to death and have been reborn to follow Jesus just as he calls us to do in the Gospel today, just as he gives us our being. This is why we are here on a cold Sunday morning following Christ, not at home in bed or by the fire.
The Greek word for ‘follow’, as it often is in the Gospel of Luke, means to follow by accompanying, by come alongside, by coming next to – not following from behind. This is what we have all already committed our lives to doing – to come close to Jesus, to become intimate with him.
We do not, we cannot today, follow Jesus as the three disciples who followed him in today’s Gospel did - by physically walking with him, besides his physical body to Jerusalem. The conclusion of that journey, as the reading today states, is that Jesus is taken up – his body is lifted up to God.
In the absence of his physical body, we follow Jesus as and in the Body of Christ – Jesus reflected in the lives of the people around us, the people we accompany, the people we walk and travel with, our family and friends, our neighbours and the stranger in our midst – all of them being and existing from God.
And we know that the presence of Christ is found in the love we have for each other, for our families, for our beloved dead and for this physical life, for our homes and security, caring for ourselves so we can care for others.
So, we can, if we choose, follow Jesus with the singular devotion and purpose we were created for, by knowing Christ is already in our lives.
And this, is why as our readings from Galatians states we are set free by Christ – to follow him in freedom with others, to grow spiritually in community through love as the Body of Christ – for this reading is also clear “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
By that love we are following Christ in our midst, and we become who we are to be.
What this following Jesus through our lives means though, is that we are still called to set our faces, like Jesus, to Jerusalem. Our own personal Jerusalem calls us throughout our lives; to enter and die, so we may live again and more fully. Sometimes it will be a personal challenge, or an aspect of ourselves we are called to surrender, to change. Or it may, as our Galatians readings states, be part our unregenerated nature, called the flesh by Paul, that we need to crucify, to bring to death so something greater my live.
And of course, one day it will be our own personal and inevitable physical death.
Death comes to us all, to each and every person. Had he not been crucified, Jesus, fully human like us, would have inevitably grown old and would have inevitably died.
Like Christ on the road to Jerusalem we do not know how and when we will die, just that we will. We do know however, that Christ, who donates our being to us, is with us and will be with us and will lift us up with him, as he was lifted up.
And so, we set our faces and we walk.
In the Name of Christ. Amen.