Luke 9: 51 As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; 53 but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. 54 When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them[b]?”55 But Jesus turned and rebuked them. 56 Then he and his disciples went to another village.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 dens 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.”
I could have been the thirteenth disciple. My name is Isakar, and I’m from a tiny hamlet just inside Judea from the southeast edge of Samaria. My father was the chief of this village and of the clan of four interrelated Jewish families who live here. He was, that is, until he died recently. Then leadership of this clan and village fell to me, his eldest son.
Everyone on their way to Jerusalem through Jericho has to pass by our place. Huge crowds come through for the three major holidays of Passover, the New Year and the Feast of Tabernacles. From pilgrims and traders we get news of the outside world. So the mighty maneuvers of empires are part and parcel of evening after-dinner discussions around the fire, along with who’s engaged to whom and what price so-and-so got for this year’s rye. That’s also how we heard and learned so much about Jesus, the Nazarene, before he came through here.
During his last trip to Jerusalem for the Passover, Jesus decided not to take the route around Samaria that Jews usually take to avoid contact with the Samaritans. He took the straight route through Samaria, knowing that we all would know what a blatant, very public and provocative statement he was making thereby. Some Messiah this man is, we thought, fraternizing with our enemies, the Samaritans, those hopeless, half-breed heretics.
The Romans we could understand. Power-hungry, conquest-crazy, idol-happy pagans, we knew what they were about. But Samaritans, who are neither totally pagan nor Jewish, but both and neither, they just gall us all the more for that. So you can understand why all the gossip mils were churning about Jesus’ strange and shocking itinerary among the Samaritans. It didn’t make his stock go up in many people’s eyes.
We also heard about the reception he got in Samaria. As we heard it, Jesus sent two of his disciples ahead into one village to find a place to stay, but they got chased out like goats from a vineyard. What did he expect there, a victory parade? Those two disciples came back to Jesus, running for their very lives, and asked for permission to call down fire on those Samaritans.
That sounded reasonable to me, at least at the time. If He is the Messiah, I thought, and if he has the kind of wonder-working powers we’ve been hearing about, calling down fire on his enemies ought to be a snap for him. Elisha the prophet called down fire on two squads of soldiers sent to arrest him. How much more should the Messiah-if that’s who he is–torch his enemies to cinders? Or at least he could empower his disciples to do that, if they are the new company of the prophets, the heirs of Elisha’s mantle.
In fact, “Why stop with torching just one Samaritan village,” my younger brother asked? “Wipe out all of Samaria, and I’ll be the first of this family to join the Nazarene,” he said. “After all, doesn’t Jesus see how they’re increasing in number faster than us Jews, moving into communities outside of Samaria where they aren’t welcome and don’t belong? Soon, no decent Jewish neighborhood will be free of them,” he added. Most of those there, who heard him said, “Amen!”
But I couldn’t, much to my own surprise. And Jesus the Nazarene obviously didn’t see things that way, either. Instead he rebuked his own disciples, and not the hostile Samaritans! He rebuked his own disciples for wanting to do with the Samaritans what so many of us have really, secretly wanted to do ever since our ancestors returned from captivity in Babylon and found these half-breed intruders squatting on our land.
Hang it all, Jesus never did do what it took to be popular with the right people. He never did give in one centimeter to the dark side of people. He always and only appealed to what’s best and good and peaceful in us. That’s fine, I guess, if you wish to end up a martyr like he did. But if you want power and popularity, well, as the proverb goes, “Even the jackals get fresh meat from time to time.” But that’s just not Jesus’ way. He was happy to just be the poor people’s Messiah, the king with no army but the most powerless, the warrior without weapons.
It was after that humiliating rejection in Samaria that Jesus and his disciples came by our village one evening on the way to Jerusalem, for the Passover. It being late in the day, my father offered him and his disciples a meal and a place to stay. It wasn’t because my father liked Jesus. It was just that for Jesus to stay anywhere else in our village would have been an affront to my father’s leadership. First crack at Hospitality is part of the price of being chief around here.
That night, after dinner, my father went straight to bed. He felt he already knew everything he needed to know about Jesus and didn’t care to converse and see if there might be more. But I sat up with Jesus and his friends around the fire, talking. Being in on the discussion that night was like contemplating the stars on a clear, moonless night. I felt my sense of wonder strangely awakened. I began to realize for the first time that our God could do more and better things for me than just to destroy our enemies and make me chief of this hamlet. I began to see the shape of a new world emerging, one that was yet, surprisingly, in keeping with the very heart of our Judaism. I had never seen it that way before. And yet it seemed deeply familiar. I began to see the strange and liberating possibility of living without hatred or fear of others, and with no burden of vengeance, score-settling, or keeping others in their place. A Judaism without ethnic boundaries, in which the neighbor we loved as ourselves could include the Samaritan, even the Roman, in which mercy and reconciliation, more than ritual and food regulations, was the heart of the law. Isn’t that how it was originally meant to be? Thinking about such new and yet familiar things gave me great peace, yet there was no way I could sleep that night.
What also kept me up that night was fear: I also feared this Jesus and his world of freedom from fear and the iron-clad distinctions between us and other races and classes of people. I knew that if I let go and allowed myself to be swept into this river of mercy and peace, as part of me so greatly wanted, that would put me at odds with my father and our clan. He had already threatened to disown any son or daughter who followed any friend of Samaritans. He and my uncles see nothing wrong with the world that torching their villages and driving out Romans wouldn’t solve. They have no sense for how they and their hatreds have helped make of the Promised Land a hell on earth. I have, and that is why the Jesus way is so attractive to me. But should I court expulsion from my family, if that means letting my younger brother inherit the leadership of this clan and village in my place? He’s the most unreflective and reactionary of all my siblings, more like our father than our father!
The next morning, after breakfast, as Jesus and his followers were getting ready to leave, Jesus put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Follow me.” That’s saying more than, “Let’s walk in in the same direction.” When a rabbi says, “Follow me,” that’s his way of saying, “Join my school—be my disciple.”
Me, a rabbi’s disciple? Me, a semi-educated, rural farmer who only knows a few prayers in Hebrew, me, apprentice myself to a rabbi… to become a rabbi? What did he see in me that my own rabbi never saw? But the tingle that ran down my spine and the compelling look in his eyes moved my soul so deeply. I felt, in the depths of my heart, that I did want to be this man’s disciple more than I wanted to be chief of this village and clan. I tried to hide that feeling from him, but I swear, from the look in his eyes, that he must have seen right through me.
But then I thought about my family and my father. In fact, I had been trying to figure out some way I might follow Jesus without getting disowned and losing the leadership that was rightly mine. The only way out that I could figure was to wait for my father to die, and then declare myself for Jesus. At my father’s advanced age and frail condition, that could be any day. I could then lead our entire village into becoming a nest of Nazarene supporters.
So I said to Jesus, “Let me go and bury my father first.” That was a Judean manner of speech, of course. I didn’t really mean that my father was right then and there laid out dead on the ground, awaiting burial. I meant, “Let me wait until my father is dead; it won’t be long.” But my leaving to follow you now would kill him off, literally, and me figuratively, by getting me disowned.
Of course, after father’s death, there would still be the funeral and seven days of ritual uncleanness and another 33 days of mourning, so even if my father had died that very day, I couldn’t have followed Jesus for another six weeks at least.
With his hand still on my shoulder, and with deepening sorrow in his eyes, Jesus went on to say, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
“Leave the dead to bury their own dead,” another Jewish way with words that meant more than the actual few words. Jesus was also intimating that people like my own father, who would block my entry into God’s kingdom, were already dead in a way, spiritually at least. In a way, I was relieved to hear someone else say something that I had suspected all along, but that I couldn’t bring myself to say aloud, even if it was about my own father. But Jesus also implied that for me to stay behind for anything, to let anything or anyone delay my entry into his kingdom, was to risk my own spiritual death. With these words Jesus also ruled out the possibility of being only a secret, covert follower of Jesus, a shadow sympathizer, like the folks who secretly support the anti-Roman guerrillas, but who don’t have the nerve to do so openly. Those rebels will take whatever support they can get, open or covert. But not Jesus. He seems to want all or nothing from us.
At that terrible moment I knew I faced two great, stark, mutually exclusive choices, each with frightening and eternal consequences. I wavered back and forth for a minute, and then…and then…I turned…away. I left the presence of Jesus and his enquiring eyes and walked back to the embrace of my home and family. I feared them more, I guess, than I did the possibility of my own spiritual death. But in addition to fear I felt anger: anger at my family, my clan, my village, for the control they seemed to have over me. Or that I let them have over me.
In the days that followed I worked hard thinking up excuses for my choice to not follow Jesus. Have I no rights, I wondered? Have we no rights to avenge ourselves on enemies like the Samaritans? Have we no right to the joys of normal family and village life? Have we no rights to keep our faith and our beliefs to ourselves? Have I no right to be a secret friend of Jesus and run this clan and hamlet as I was obviously destined to do, by being the first-born? Can’t I just admire Jesus and his miracles without having to publicly identify with his controversial causes, like peace and reconciliation with the Samaritans?
Since then, Jesus has died a horrible death, by crucifixion. My father saw that death as proof that the Nazarene was demon-possessed and cursed for being a teacher of falsehoods and misleading the people. He said it all came down to that choice to not torch that Samaritan village. If he had, he might have followed the Nazarene too. And the Romans would have thought twice about laying a hand on him. Those were very nearly his last words in this life.
Now my father is gone, God rest his soul, Unlike Jesus, he died in his own bed, surrounded by loved ones. And I have buried him, like I said I would. But I still can’t follow the Nazarene. With all our family and relatives and friends coming from near and far to comfort us mourners, I find the pressure to carry on in my father’s exact same footsteps too great to resist. Now I see that my father, though head of this extend clan, was really not a free man. To be head of this clan and village is to ride a lion, which is a powerful place to be. Until you need to dismount, that is. I now know that he was more like the figurehead of a ship than its rudder. And such am I, now that his responsibilities have fallen to me. From a hundred aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and friends come requests and demands and pressures that have to do with everything under the sun except following Jesus. It would have been far easier to declare myself for Jesus back then, when Jesus laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “Follow me.” The pain of being disowned would have been easier to bear, and over more quickly, than the shame of abdicating leadership and responsibility over this large, unruly and demanding clan.
We hear rumors, though, that Jesus has come back from the dead and has been seen by up to 500 of his followers. Part of me believes that and hopes it’s so. But the other part of me fears that this is so, and hopes it isn’t. If these rumors of resurrection should prove true, then all my excuses for not leaving and following Jesus then and there are but pointless lies.
What’s more, Jesus’ disciples are going about the Holy City and Judea like the prophets of old, healing the sick, preaching about the risen Jesus and baptizing thousands of native and immigrant Jews. The same thing is even starting to happen in Samaria, I hear. Some of those very disciples who ate and slept in our house, after being run out of Samaria, are now eating and sleeping in the homes of Samaritans who are also becoming Jesus’ disciples without first having to become Jews. That rustling sound I hear, is it the wind in the treetops, or is it my father—God rest his soul—turning over in his grave? For all my father’s faults, he could see this development coming. He predicted that this Jesus and his movement would eventually blur the boundaries between us Jews and outsiders—like Samaritans, probably even Gentiles. And now that my father’s warnings are coming to pass, how can I ever bring this clan into the Nazarene’s camp? How would they ever even tolerate my joining?
A great rift is opening up all across Palestine over this Jesus. While his disciples reconcile with Samaritans and unobservant Jews, whole villages and clans are becoming deeply divided. The elders of this clan look to me to prevent it from happening here. The people who are most against Jesus and what all he stood for are not content to say to those leaning in Jesus’ direction “Believe as you wish, but keep it to yourselves.” Now they are seeing to it that there can’t be even any secret following of Jesus. They’re seeking and hounding Jesus’ friends out of the synagogues, out of the markets, even out of their homes and families. That’s happened twice already in our synagogue down the road, and my silence about the matter is interpreted by the majority as consent. That makes me now a persecutor, doesn’t it? Now I wonder, “Have the Nazarenes no rights?”
Thus with each passing day I find the possibility of declaring myself for Jesus growing more difficult and more costly than it was when Jesus said, “Follow me.” What a fool I was to think that there would ever be an easy, cost-free time to follow Jesus. While among us and in the flesh, Jesus seemed to go out of his way to turn back half-hearted novelty seekers who wanted to follow him on their own terms. The very night he stayed with us, I saw one eager, bright-eyed, idealistic and naïve young man run up to Jesus and promise to follow him wherever he went. But Jesus told him, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” That young man’s face went from smiles to shock to anger to disappointment before he, too, turned and walked away. What did he expect, an enlistment bonus like what the Roman army gives? But now Jesus’ enemies have taken over the service of dissuading half-hearted seekers.
Things are now so hard for Jesus’ followers that you might as well go all the way and embrace him, along with all that he stood for, as well as all his friends, whoever they are, even the Samaritans, because you’ll need all the friends you can get.
Yet, when you compare Jesus’ persecuted followers to the powerful, privileged people like myself, it’s plain to see that they are the happy ones, now at peace, and not I. Jesus’ words of warning and discouragement sounded so harsh and self-defeating at first. Now they must sound like words of comfort and cheer to his homeless and hounded followers. Their happiness cost them something alright, but I can see that they didn’t pay too much, and that their rewards are rolling in. I, by contrast, may never stop paying for my choice. I pay now in anguished, divided feelings and in headaches over endless, unresolvable worldly dilemmas that Jesus’ followers need never face. Ruling this clan and village is not only impossible, it’s pointless. How can managing all the childish intrigue, the power plays and the rivalries between estranged cousins and jealous siblings, be anywhere near as important or worthwhile as proclaiming the kingdom of God, as Jesus invited me to do? How often I remember, and treasure, and long for, that sense of peace, hope and wonder that I first felt around the fire that night with Jesus and his friends.
And while I’m on the subject of preaching and proclamation, let me do a little of that right now. I see now that the mere fact of Jesus forces everyone to make a choice and weigh the costs. And should you choose to follow the Nazarene, then you have to watch out that power, privilege, possessions or popularity don’t weigh you down and trip you up. My entanglements with this world are clear to see. Others might be more subtle. I don’t have a rule of thumb that says that this is how we know when we are too over-anxious, over-obligated and over-committed to the world to follow Jesus, like I currently am. You’ll just know when you approach that point. No sense in trying to fool oneself about it—it isn’t worth trying to have all this and the kingdom of heaven too. You just can’t.
But I so wanted my rights and my freedom. Now I see that power and personal rights alone don’t give true freedom. True freedom comes with following Jesus. His homeless followers are free now in a way I dare not be. He even gives us the freedom to reject him and walk away, if we so want. Because Jesus seems to value the obedience of our free wills above anything else. Maybe that constitutes the great love of God that he so often talked about: that God so respects our freedom that he doesn’t take many roadblocks out of the path of following him. We have to choose to climb them.
Freedom like that is another new and strange idea around here. We take a lot of security from our God-given stations in life. A few are born noble and rich, but most of us are born peasants and poor. Likewise, we’re Jews because we were born that way. I guess the Samaritans and the Romans had no choice over being born that way, either, I’ll grant you. But to join the Messiah’s kingdom by choice, at such personal cost, without being compelled by fire from heaven or being hooked on free bread from stones, freedom from animosity and the duty to avenge your people’s hurts and humiliation, to enter a world of reconciliation with our enemies, that opens up a strange new world for us, a world of which I hope I can yet prove worthy, some day.