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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
It isn’t easy being rejected. Maybe you really wanted that new job. You put a lot of work into applying for it. You thought that you had a good interview, but someone else was chosen instead. Perhaps another time, you really thought someone was the love of your life. You would have done anything for him or her, but he or she didn’t feel the same way, and your heart was broken. Maybe you’d practiced real hard to make a sports team or get a part in the play, but when the final list was posted, your name wasn’t on it. Putting our best effort into something, only to have someone else tell us we’re not what they’re looking for, can hurt us. It can cut us to our very core.
The Son of God was no stranger to rejection. Throughout the entire Old Testament, one generation after another rejected God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s promises. When God came down to interact with His people Israel as the Angel of the Lord, or when He spoke through His appointed prophets, His messages and warnings were just as likely to be ignored or ridiculed as they were to be accepted.
His human mother wasn’t provided a decent place to give Him birth. An earthly king who feared Him tried to destroy Him. The people of His own hometown tried to drive Him off a cliff for speaking about who He was and why He had come. Even so, he persevered. The rejected prophet; the rejected Son; the rejected Savior. Yet he still pressed on, knowing His fate, knowing of the hate and jealousy and anger so many harbored against Him, but always faithful to His calling.
In our reading today, Jesus is rejected again, by many people and in several different ways. They reject His person. They reject His message. They reject discipleship.
Luke, chapter 9, verse 51 is viewed by many theologians as a major pivotal point of this gospel. It’s where Jesus’ ministry shifts from revelation to salvation; from epiphany to passion. Jesus had already revealed to the disciples who He is and what He must do. Now He sets out on the path that will take Him to the cross:
“When the days drew near for Him to be taken up, He set His face to go to Jerusalem.” (Luke 9:51, ESV)
We all know what happens when God “sets His face,” don’t we?
When He sets His face against people, they are doomed to disaster and destruction. When He makes His face shine upon us, when He lifts up His face—His countenance—upon us, we are greatly blessed. Here, the setting of Jesus’ face is one of resolve.
“And He sent messengers ahead of Him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make preparations for Him.” (Luke 9:52, ESV)
Rather than avoiding the Samaritans as most Jews did, Jesus strides boldly into their territory. It’s one of many “invasions” by Jesus that Luke records in his Gospel account, beginning with His cosmic invasion of the incarnation. Here Jesus sends messengers on ahead into Samaria, not only to prepare accommodations such as lodging and food, but also to offer His message of repentance, hope, and salvation.
The Samaritans, though, reject Jesus and His message. Not only is Jesus a Galilean and a Jew, but He also intends to go to Jerusalem, the capital of Judea. The centuries-old animosities of ethnicity and religion between Samaritans and Jews are far stronger than even the opportunity to receive this great teacher and healer whose fame had spread throughout the whole region. “He may be great,” the Samaritans probably thought, “but He isn’t one of us.”
James and John, indignant that these despised foreigners have insulted their rabbi, want to take revenge. Full of themselves as they often were, they allow their hurt pride and self-righteous anger to overshadow Jesus’ message. They want to call down heavenly fire to destroy the Samaritans. Perhaps they were recalling what Elijah had done, centuries before, to Samaritans who rejected God’s messenger and message.
And yet, in expressing these thoughts, James and John are rejecting Jesus’ message, too. In spite of all they’d seen and heard, they still didn’t comprehend the will of God or the mission of Jesus.
Jesus is no doubt saddened by the Samaritans’ rejection, but He does not stop to reason or argue with them. He is not deterred or distracted. He does not reject or punish the Samaritans. Instead, Jesus rebukes James and John for going off-message. Jesus had come to supply compassion and mercy, not to seek vengeance for sins. He came to be the suffering servant, not to be elevated to a lofty position. Jesus presses on.
What James and John failed to understand, and what we ourselves sometimes forget, is that those who reject Jesus and His message will not necessarily be punished for it in the present world. Many unbelievers will even prosper in the here-and-now, often making the faithful jealous and frustrated.
How awful, though, is the unbelievers’ fate at their deaths, and for all eternity.
There were others on the road as Jesus traveled along, too. Jesus speaks to a few of them in our text. To the first, a seemingly willing disciple who offers to follow Jesus wherever He might go, our Savior gives a warning:
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” (Luke 9:58, ESV)
Jesus gives him the unvarnished truth about the life of discipleship: It will not always be easy. It will not always be pleasant. You may not have a place of safety and comfort to rest from your labors. As Christians, we will not be welcomed everywhere we go with open arms, any more than the Lord Himself.
Perhaps Jesus’ warning spooked the other two potential followers. The second one wanted to delay his service until his father died. The third wanted to bid farewell to his family first. To that second one, Jesus says:
“Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60, ESV)
Jesus not only indicates that the work of the Kingdom of God takes precedence over all other responsibilities, but also that we are not to let the spiritually dead impede the work we have been given of bringing spiritual life to all who need it.
To the third would-be disciple, Jesus combines some common wisdom with a warning about remaining focused:
“No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:62, ESV)
It’s a simple fact that no one can effective follow a straight path forward while he is looking backwards. Any of you who’ve plowed a field, or piloted a plane, or conned a ship know full well: You must pick out a point in the distance or on the horizon, or a bearing to a star, or a constant setting on a compass, if you want to steer a straight line. Even driving a car, you need to look forward, well ahead in the lane you are in, if you want to stay on course. Only those who look to goals outside of themselves, to the full and final realization of the Kingdom of God, will have the focus needed to live in Christ and to proclaim His message.
Jesus also indicates, here and elsewhere, that just as He gave up everything for us and for our salvation, we also must be willing to give up everything for the sake of God’s Kingdom. We may become alienated from family and friends who will not accompany us on our journey of faith and service.
Led by God the Holy Spirit, though, we do not cling to desires of the flesh or to our earthly possessions. Instead we shift our efforts and devote our resources to the Lord’s work. We follow Christ, carrying our crosses daily. These are hard things to think about. They are harder yet to accept and believe, and harder still to live out amid all the temptations of life.
It’s not easy at all, and you may find yourself like those potential disciples Jesus met on the road, wanting to pick and choose your own customized way of discipleship. So, I might ask: What do you accept and reject about Jesus? About His message? About discipleship? Is your Jesus a fine ancient teacher, a giver of timeless wisdom and moral guidance? Is He a wonderful example of tolerant love and compassion, giving up His own livelihood to travel the countryside, offering forgiveness, healing, and encouragement to the fragile and the hopeless?
Is He the pinnacle of human development, a man so in tune with Himself that He was perfectly obedient to an objective ethical code, showing us that we, too, could aspire to greatness?
If your beliefs in Jesus end there—or even if they only begin to wander there—you have fallen into Satan’s trap. You will have become a victim of the worldly understanding of who Jesus is and what He does, which provides you no real hope and certainly gives you no salvation or eternal life. Much of the world, especially the false faiths that so many have come to accept as valid alternatives to the Gospel of Christ, want a Jesus with whom they can come to terms. They want a Jesus who says things and does things that don’t offend anyone, a Jesus who can be fully grasped and fully comprehended.
Unfortunately, a Jesus like that does not have the authority to forgive your sins. A Jesus like that cannot quell or quench the wrath of a holy God that you and I have alienated with our miserable, sinful lives.
A Jesus like that cannot die to save you and give you eternal life. Only a Jesus who is both God and man can do those things. The Jesus that must be given to us in faith or rejected in worldliness is the Jesus who says what He says and does what He does. There is no compromise. There is no re-interpretation—no “spin”—for the sensitivities of modern man, no adjustment for the social or cultural setting, no softening of the truth for acceptability. There is no picking and choosing of what people can and can’t agree to, or what they find palatable and unoffensive.
We are not shopping for grocery brands or negotiating a deal on a new car, things in which we have choice and leverage. Rather, we are coming face to face with God’s perfect will and with God’s inerrant word. And it is sometimes difficult for us to accept a message and a life in which we have no say other than the option of rejecting it.
God came to us as the baby of Bethlehem, and we shake our heads in wonder. He comes to us in His Word, and we wrestle with its challenges, its complexities, and its hard sayings. He is lifted before us on a cross, and we struggle to make sense of it. God in water? God in bread? God in wine? God in a book? Is it any wonder that He is rejected by so many as being unreasonable and incomprehensible?
How often do the doubts creep even into our own thinking? Does God really do things this way? Could He really forgive me all my sins, even those that still embarrass me and terrify me? Could He truly mean that we are to place Him above all else in our lives? With all these doubts, our rational minds reject Jesus. Our corrupted hearts reject His message—just like the Samaritans, just like James and John did that day, just like most of Judea and Jerusalem would in the months to come.
But Jesus didn’t give up on the Samaritans, or on James and John, or Judea, or anyone else. In the same way, even when our minds and our hearts reject who Jesus is and what His message says, He does not reject us. He does not give up. He does not turn away—from you, or from the cross that saves you.
Nor can we who are His elect people ever fully reject Him who claims us from all eternity. We were baptized into His death. We were bought at a price. No one can snatch us out of the hand of our Lord.
The scriptures do not record what those three would-be disciples’ final responses were to Jesus’ invitation, but that’s not what’s really important. Even if they finally rejected the offered discipleship, we who have been adopted as God’s sons and daughters cannot. As Paul wrote, “Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Our discipleship, then, is not one of burden and inconvenience. It is a burden of joy and freedom from the fear of sin and death through Christ’s sacrifice for us. One of the key marks of this freedom is our willingness to follow Christ and serve others.
When we have been told that we must leave our worldly concerns behind in order to follow Christ’s commands, it can be difficult to see how love for our neighbor and family can be properly expressed. But this is only difficult if we choose to make it so. Jesus makes it simple: If we follow Him first, trusting in His death and resurrection, then we will have both the freedom and the means to love all others.
It is only when we imprison ourselves in our sinful earthly minds that we allow our jealousies, worries, and desires to make us selfish sinners rather than generous saints. When we reject the Savior, we also are rejecting the Creator and the Sanctifier, and so we find it very easy to reject our fellow creatures.
Jesus did not reject who He was, what He was to proclaim, or what He was to do. He was everything we are not: Steadfast in His mission, consistent in His message, and faithful to His calling even to death. We need Him as our Savior because He alone could do what we could never do. He alone could keep the commandments. He alone could set His face to Jerusalem and to the cross—focused and undeterred. Unlike the Samaritans, unlike James and John, unlike the other would-be disciples, Jesus was not distracted. He was determined to do those hard things at which we balk and often turn away. He accepted the cost of following God’s will when we run from it. Thanks be to Him that He willingly put His hand to the plow and did not look back. Praise God that, for your life and salvation, He set His face to Jerusalem. In His (+) holy name, Amen.
