NOTES for Luk 9:57-62

The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. Nowhere... but why? Why do we find somewhere to lay our heads, while there is no place for Him? Even the most destitute homeless person in Moscow will find some warm corner in a railway station or elsewhere, but there is no place for our Lord. Why? He did, after all, recline at meals and even visit wealthy homes, which means that rich people received Him. Why, then, does He say that He has nowhere to lay His head? Is He really complaining of homelessness and poverty? Certainly not.

One might say that our first reaction to these words really is boundless pity, love, and tenderness. How many mystical experiences these words have inspired, how much has been said about giving the Lord one's heart so that He might lay His head there. But are these the only feelings the Lord wants to awaken in us through the words of today's reading? If so, it would mean that He is simply complaining, simply asking to be pitied. One cannot say that this is entirely absent, for the Lord also assumed human nature, in which the desire for love and tenderness is embedded and is not in itself sinful. Yet there remains a sense that we should not stop at this understanding of His words alone; we must think more deeply and seek other meanings.

When a child is ill and lies feverish at night, the mother cannot sleep. Even if nothing depends on her and there is nothing she can do, she cannot lay down her head and fall asleep. But as soon as the temperature falls, sleep comes of itself. In reality, our world too is gravely ill. Think about it: has a single minute ever passed on earth without someone dying somewhere or some disaster occurring? For us, time is divided into night and day; for the Lord, in whose hands is the whole earth, there is neither night nor day.

One recalls the “Evening Prayer” of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: “In a hospital or in a sick person's room there are people who will not fall asleep because they are in pain, because they are afraid, because they are anxious for those they love, some of whom share the burden of their illness while others will be left bereaved by their death. There are people in the solitude of prison; some are young, and somewhere beyond the walls there is a girl they love, there are their children, their friends, there is freedom, there once was hope, and now nothing remains. There are also prisons where the nights are terrible, where interrogations are about to begin; they drag on for long hours in the heart of the night; someone will be beaten, someone tortured. They will return to their cells exhausted and enter a day in which they will have no comfort, only fear of the coming night. Night is now closing over them, fear enveloping their body and soul. Moreover, in every city there is the noisy night, the night of bars, the night of gambling, the drunkard's night, the night in which young men and women will lose their purity; the night when spouses, forgetting love and seized only by desire, will be harsh with one another. There are people who will lose their honour and be ashamed to wake in the morning.”

And as we reflect on these words of the Metropolitan, we may ask: when there are such nights on earth, how can the Lord sleep?

The Lord Jesus Christ's replies to the words of three people who come to Him expressing a desire to follow Him often leave the reader troubled. Why, instead of welcoming new followers, does the Lord in effect reject them and expose something in their desire to follow Him? This question is often prompted by our own fears: we are afraid that He might also reject our desire to follow Jesus. In any case, Christ's words in today's reading from Luke's Gospel shock us; they contradict certain deeply hidden assumptions of ours. Sometimes we even feel resentful towards the evangelist: without this passage, everything would be much smoother and more pleasant for us.

We should probably distinguish three main reasons for this attitude towards these words of Christ. First, our habitual, stereotyped ideas may be wrong. Second, we may not understand what the Lord is saying. And third, perhaps we are applying to everyone, including ourselves, what is being said to quite specific people for quite specific reasons. In this case, all three reasons seem to be at work at once.

The belief that the Lord will not cast out anyone who comes to Him is based on His own words. Yet He Himself also says that not everyone who calls Him ‘Lord’ can enter into life, but only the one who does the will of the heavenly Father. God, then, is not a politician whose aim is popularity at any price. Only someone with a certain purity of intention can follow Him. Probably, whenever we seek God, there is some corruption in our motives; in certain cases, however, it makes our coming to Christ—not impossible, no—but ruinous for us ourselves. Such are the three examples given by the evangelist. One person, attracted by the glory of the messianic Kingdom, wants to share in it, but the Lord speaks of His path as one of rejection and suffering. The second and third want to follow Christ on their own terms: ‘I will follow You, but...’ they say. Here the person determines his own path and tries to do God a kind of favour by agreeing to follow Him. All these things are far from spiritually harmless, as the Lord Jesus' replies point out.

Clearly, the first reason for our rejection of Christ's words is directly linked to the third: we should not apply His answers to these three people to the whole world. For them not to apply to us, we need only avoid repeating these people's mistakes.

And finally, we really do need to grasp the essence of what the Lord wishes to say. To the first of the three people mentioned He is, in effect, speaking about the Cross. It is important that suffering on the Cross and rejection by people appear here as the Lord Jesus' constant companions throughout His earthly journey, from the cave at Bethlehem to Golgotha. It is important to hear Christ's answer to the man who does not agree to follow Him because of a most important filial duty together with the question. This man says: allow me to leave You, because something important is waiting for me somewhere out there. But there is only one place one can go on leaving God: hell, because wherever God is absent, that is hell. And Christ says to this man: no, it is from there that you need to leave and come to Me. Both question and answer are built around the verb apelauno, ‘to leave, to go away’. Where Christ is absent, Jesus says, there is the realm of the dead. One should leave not Christ to go there, but that place to come to Christ. You, the Lord says, go and proclaim the Kingdom. The third man, while agreeing to follow Christ, tries to reserve a certain degree of freedom for himself; perhaps, too, he is looking to boast to his loved ones about how much he has grown spiritually, now that he is leaving to follow the Teacher from Nazareth. And the Lord tells him that such double-mindedness is impossible before the face of God.

That, apparently, is why it mattered to the evangelist Luke to include these three brief dialogues in the Gospel: so that we might see a true picture of what was happening and learn something from this example.

Jesus' words about the dead burying their own dead may seem too harsh in the situation in which they were spoken. But on reflection, it is not hard to see that the situation itself was essentially critical, although the man whom Jesus called to follow Him apparently asked nothing extraordinary of Him. On the contrary, he was speaking of what we would normally call a sacred duty: burying his own father. There is an interesting interpretation of this request. Some commentators believe that the father of the man mentioned in the account was not already dead, but was still alive and awaiting death, either because of illness or simply because of advanced age. The man was asking for a postponement so that his father could live out in peace the—probably few—years remaining to him on earth. He was ready to follow Jesus; he was only asking for a delay.

But Jesus did not grant him this delay. Why? One might say that postponements weaken a person, often depriving them of the resolve they had at a particular moment, a resolve that fades with time because they never did what they had decided to do. But this is only one side of the matter. The other is that, in spiritual life, there is generally no “later” at all. God is outside time, and one can meet Him only in the present, only here and now. Yet “here and now,” as the meeting point between a person and God, is projected into one entirely specific moment in time and one entirely specific point in space. Jesus marked out precisely this point for the man mentioned in the account. At that point, the utmost concentration is required on God's presence, on the revelation of His will, and on the task set before the person in the context of all this.

But the man of whom the evangelist speaks does not have this concentration. He is not in the eternal present where his meeting with God took place; he is in the temporal present, where the past gives way to the future and the present proves to be not a meeting point with God but merely the place where what does not yet exist meets what no longer exists. The Savior's sharp words are needed to tear the man out of the temporal present and set him before God in the eternal present. This, of course, is still no guarantee in itself, for a person is free. But a moment of the greatest clarity possible for a person always becomes their moment of truth: the truth toward which they must take a stand—for the sake of the Kingdom and salvation.

The Bible offers many examples of this “looking back”: Lot's wife, Israel during the Exodus... We look for ideals in the past, without realizing that the Kingdom of God is always here and ahead of us. Here it is worth recalling a thought from the contemporary author Richard Rohr:

“The Good News always points to the future, toward some new place, toward a promised land. It never points backward. Yet the irony of Christian history lies in our habit of turning backward and saying: ‘Miracles happened in the old days. It was back then that God was God, back then that the great prophets lived. It was in the Middle Ages that the great saints lived...’ Through this irony, the Word of God has changed from a liberating force into a defensive force. Because we did not truly listen to the Word of God, we began performing religious gymnastics and lost touch with the power of God's Word.”

How close the apostles' reaction is to us. On the one hand, there is nothing surprising in this, since we are all human, and besides, being like a future apostle is a very good thing. On the other hand, in what way are we like them? Precisely in the fact that we are human, and in our "common human" reactions. The disciples, burning with zeal for the Teacher, are offended that people did not want to receive Him. Someone treated their Teacher the same way any other people would be treated: a traveler was refused shelter. And now "righteous anger" is raging before us, since these simple fishermen surely did not calmly speak the words about calling down punishing heavenly fire, however unemotionally this is set out in the Gospel (see Luke 9:54). And these simple people consider themselves entitled to avenge such inhospitable treatment of their Lord. They may be moved by the words of Christ when He sent them out to preach: "And if any place will not receive you and will not listen to you, when you leave there, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town" (Mark 6:11). And then it was about them, while here it is about their Teacher. So the punishment must be corresponding!..

And if we imagine Joseph behaving this way when no one wanted to admit him and Mary, who was about to give birth? How many people and houses would have been burned with fire?

It is astonishing that in this case the disciples have faith that fire will come at their request. And the question does not sound like this: "Will fire come down from heaven if we ask?" but "Do You want us to say that fire should come down from heaven and destroy them?" (Luke 9:54).

And how wonderful it is that faith in God and in the truth that "whatever they ask will be given them by My Father in heaven" is accompanied by dialogue with the Lord. Because He rejects the disciples' proposal and rebukes them (Luke 9:55), directing their paths along the right way.

Today we read a small selection of short accounts about Jesus, assembled by the evangelist to show how extraordinary His Message is and how incompatible it is with normal human ideas. In the coming Kingdom of God, everything will be different from what is customary on earth: the most important and respected will be those who are least valued in human eyes (for children had no rights before reaching adulthood and were regarded as their parents' property, like slaves, yet Jesus holds them up as an example to the disciples). Jesus forbids His disciples to divide people into “ours” and “not ours,” although this is a fundamental principle of human society (for comparison, watch the news on television). His Kingdom lies outside our system of values and proves more important even than the sacred duty to bury one's father, more important than a comfortable home and family. It takes hold of a person entirely—the one who asked Jesus about His Kingdom has already “put his hand to the plow,” already begun the paradoxical path toward God...

Today's reading is entirely devoted to the theme of the Kingdom and to how the people around Jesus understood it, including His closest disciples. And once again we encounter a complete failure, even on the apostles' part, to understand what the Kingdom is and what its laws are. The very question of primacy, of who is greatest in the Kingdom (v. 46), loses all meaning there. Jesus was able to explain this by pointing the disciples to a child, whom the problem of primacy, because of age, does not yet concern at all (vv. 47-48).

According to the laws of our world, still not transformed, the great person is the one who is great by his own greatness; in the Kingdom, as it appears, one's own greatness means nothing, and the less a person relies on it, the more the greatness of the Kingdom shines through him. That is why there is no need to impose this Kingdom by force, as the apostles thought of doing in one Samaritan village where Jews, as usual, were not welcome (vv. 51-54): in that way one can only demonstrate one's own force and prove one's own importance, but it is impossible to bring people closer to the Kingdom by such a method. It is no accident that Jesus tells the disciples that they are not acting in the spirit of the Kingdom: for the Kingdom, any violence is unacceptable; no one can be driven there by force, because to enter it one needs above all a relationship with God and with the One whom He sends, and that relationship must not be imposed but freely accepted.

A Kingdom imposed by force is not the Kingdom, but only its phantom, which can destroy a person but cannot save him. And since the Kingdom is not a place but a relationship, it is not limited by any structure. Even the apostolic community does not limit it, if one looks at that community not as a fellowship of people living in the Kingdom, but as a kind of organization for promoting the idea of the Kingdom of God. That is why everyone who bears witness to it in Christ's name, revealing to those around him its power and effectiveness, finds his own place in it, even if formally he has no relation to the apostolic community (vv. 49-50). Thus, dispelling the myths of mass religious consciousness that were so widespread in those days, Jesus strengthens in the hearts of His disciples those ideas about the Kingdom that must help them live through His death on the cross and receive His resurrection.

As can be seen, Jesus keeps explaining to His disciples, through different examples, what the life of the Kingdom is and what it is like. And the Evangelist gathers these examples together, making a kind of digest that contains short descriptions of them. Here are the disciples arguing over who is the greatest in the Kingdom. Well, after the Teacher, of course. Here are the same disciples eager to call thunder down on a Samaritan village where they are not received. Not for their own sake, of course, but for the Teacher's sake. And for the truth, naturally.

And here are people they meet along the road. One is ready to go, but Jesus tells him: I have nowhere to invite you. To another Jesus Himself says: Follow Me, and that man asks permission to bury his father, and receives an answer that sounds merciless. As does another one: the answer is softer outwardly, but in substance it says: leave it, forget everyone, or else you will have to forget the Kingdom.

What is this: a particular kind of selectiveness? Yes, of course: Jesus sees every person's heart; it is as transparent to Him as it is to His heavenly Father. But there is also something common here. The Kingdom is open to everyone. But on one condition: it must be first in the life of the one who wants to reach it. In the Kingdom people do not live out their remaining days; they live. And those who refuse to go, in one way or another, want to live out what remains. To stay with those who are living out what remains. They do not understand that one can go on living out what remains, alone or with others, endlessly. In the fallen world there is no real life; here there are only its remnants. And one has to choose: either gather up these remnants and try to squeeze the last out of them, or go where there is life in abundance. Without trying to drag along the remains of that imitation of life that can be found in the fallen world.

But there, in the Kingdom, the laws are different. There are no bosses and subordinates there; there are ministries that must be carried, and whoever knows how to do this better is the greatest. The one who is greatest in the Kingdom does not receive the best places, but the more responsible ministries. And there is no need there to prove anything to anyone. In this world too, the Kingdom does not need to be proved to anyone.

It can be shown, of course. But proving it is pointless. For proof, especially with heavenly thunder involved, always presupposes a desire to persuade by force. To make someone accept, to make someone believe. And then it no longer matters what the irresistible arguments will be: in any case they presuppose that a person yields before the inevitable, whether it is a force from which there is no escape or an obviousness that cannot be evaded. The Kingdom, of course, is both force and obviousness. But it is a force one can walk away from, and an obviousness one can choose not to notice. God does not impose Himself, and the person is free. To the free, freedom; to the saved, paradise.

These words are addressed not only to those who are just setting out to follow Jesus, but also to the disciples themselves—and to us. Does the thought never “occur” to us as to which of us is the greatest? Or do we never feel the urge to “forbid” someone who thinks differently? Or to ask God to send fire from heaven upon our enemies, “as Elijah did”? Do we always know what spirit we are of? Many of us have not only “put a hand to the plough,” but have already ploughed half the field. And yet are we looking back again?