Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-june-2-2025
Luke 9:57-62
The Cost of Following Jesus
57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
58 Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
59 He said to another man, “Follow me.”
But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”
62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
This is a passage I’ve found myself thinking about on several occasions lately. As many of you know, our church is a member of a coalition of local congregations that are working on the task of providing more affordable housing in the Medina community. So if you glance back over today’s reading, you might see why I’ve found myself thinking about this passage. It’s a passage in which Jesus says that he has no place to lay his head. In other words, as we would say it today, by this point in his ministry Jesus was basically homeless.
For that matter, you could probably say that Jesus was born in something like a homeless shelter of his time — in a barn, were those who could not afford other accommodations were forced to seek shelter.
It sort of reminds me of the parable of the sheep and goats, in which people ask, “When did we see thee, Lord?” I wonder if Jesus would reply, “You saw me homeless in your community, and wouldn’t house me because it might depress your property values.”
Of course, the part about having no place to lay his head is just the first of three conversations Jesus has in today’s passage with men who express interest in becoming his disciples. There are parts of the passage that make some readers uneasy, and also and a couple of points that require some clarification for us to fully understand them, so let’s take care of the clarifications first and then think about the passage as a whole.
One part of today’s passage that many readers find uncomfortable is the part where a man says he needs to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus. Jesus seems harsh and unfeeling — he seems to be insisting that the guy leave his poor dead father unburied. But some of the leading New Testament scholars suggest that the man’s father isn’t on his death bed. They say that the man is proposing to put off the life of discipleship for years into the future. Some scholars even suggest that the man’s motivation was financial – that if he stayed home until his father died, he would inherit the family’s wealth. If he left to follow Jesus now, they say, the father might make someone else the heir.
It seems to me that if we’re serious about following Jesus, we shouldn’t expect to experience great wealth and material comfort. We’re supposed to be living in imitation of him, and his life certainly wasn’t. The truth is that most of us (myself included) live very comfortably, compared to most of the people in this world. And the further we go along the path of discipleship, it seems to me, the more we should expect to have the Holy Spirit questioning our attachment to the things of this world and calling us to make sacrifices for the kingdom. That, it seems to me, is what Jesus is talking about in that part of the passage.
The second point of clarification concerns the man who wants to go home to say good-bye to his family. Jesus warns the man about ‘putting your hand to the plow and looking back.’ He’s referring to a basic principle of agriculture, which is that the only way to plow a straight furrow is to fix your eyes on a point at the far side of the field and plow straight toward it. If you start looking back to see how you’re doing, you’ll end up plowing a crooked furrow. I can’t help wondering if Jesus might even have been quoting an agricultural saying from his time and just adapting it to be about the kingdom of God.
It seems to me that the key phrase in the third exchange, the one about the plow, is “go back.” Jesus might have intended to warned us about any kind of ‘going back’ in the life of faith. Unless we keep our vision focused on Jesus and keep steering toward him, and especially if we keep ‘looking back’ to see how we’re doing, we risk ending up on a crooked path that gets us nowhere.
Jesus seems to be setting an impossibly high standard here. He seems to be saying that anyone who wants to be his disciple has to be willing to walk away from everything – including their family obligations. Can that possibly be the case? After all, in his letters the apostle Paul seems to be urging followers of Jesus to live as responsible citizens and family members. So how are we supposed to take this passage?
It seems to me that it’s not helpful to get caught up in the specifics of each of the men’s situations. That can just distract us from the real point Jesus is making, which is that we shouldn’t expect that following him is easy or without cost. It’s a way of life that calls faithful followers to make greater and greater sacrifices for the kingdom as we grow in our lives of faith and service.
Jesus probably isn’t expecting (or maybe even hoping) that all of us who read his words today will walk away from our responsibilities and become wandering evangelists. I tend to think instead that he’s warning all those who consider following him to expect that the path of discipleship is a demanding one. Sometimes a difficult one. Often one that includes real sacrifice.
Let’s pray. Lord, help us to hear your call to true discipleship, and to commit our hearts to making our relationship with you in Jesus the center of our lives in this world. Help us to live in obedience to his teachings and in imitation of his life of loving service to the lost and least around us. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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