What are James and John thinking? I mean, seriously, has there been anything at any point in Jesus’ ministry that would lead them to believe that when they asked, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” his response would be, “yeah, ok, that sounds like a good plan.” I mean, come on now guys. This is the end of chapter nine. You’ve been following this man for a while now. This is the man whom at his birth the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.” This is the man who when rejected by the people of his hometown, calmly “passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” This is the man who cleansed lepers, healed a centurion’s sick servant, and raised a widow’s dead son. This is a man who forgave a sinful woman, calmed a storm at sea, and even showed mercy to demons. Now, granted, that still didn’t end well for the demons, but that was the demons fault, not Jesus’. What about this man possibly made you think, James and John, that sending down fire from heaven to consume a town would be his go-to response to being not received?
And then there’s the whole question of what makes James and John think they have the power to command fire to come down from heaven in the first place. I like the way they ask Jesus if he would like them to do this for him, as if the power to command fire from heaven was something they could actually do on their own. Not so much, team, not so much. If, and that’s a big if, because nowhere in the mission of the twelve at the start of chapter nine, or the mission of the seventy that we’ll read next week, does it say anything about commanding consuming fire. Power over demons, curing diseases, and proclaiming the kingdom of God, yes. Consuming random villages with fire, oddly enough, never mentioned. But, if James and John do in fact have this power, the only reason they have it is because Jesus gave it to them. This really isn’t a thing they can do for him. This is like, hey, can I take you out to dinner? But I’m going to need you to drive. And also pay.
So this question of James and John is pretty ridiculous. It is yet another example of just how much the disciples do not get who Jesus is and what Jesus is about. And I will mock the disciples for this. I will call them out for their inability to understand the love and the grace and the mercy of Jesus, even as they are standing in his very presence. I will mock them, because it allows me to ignore the fact that my response is all too often exactly the same as the one James and John are proposing.
OK, not the commanding down fire to consume part, I do not have that much confidence in my own abilities. But certainly the desire to divide, to judge, to blame others for what I see to be wrong with the world. I am so quick to say that what I think is right and what they think is wrong, and if only they could be convinced to see the world the way I see it, then they would know the wrongness of their ways, and everything would be a whole lot better. If only they would think or vote or pray or preach or post on social media the way I do, then everything would be all right.
This is the first, but not the last, time Samaritans show up in Luke’s Gospel. So let’s take a quick commercial break here for a second and get some backstory on the conflict. Way back in history, Samaritans and Judeans were all Israelites. They all descended from Abraham, they all went to Egypt with Joseph and returned from exile with Moses. They all united under King David and were conquered by the Babylonians during the time of Isaiah. This is where the break happened. The story of the Babylonian exile is that the entire population of Israel was uprooted and shipped off to Babylon. But, of course, that was not really the case. It wouldn’t make military or economic sense to uproot an entire population. To conquer a people you only need to conquer their power players. It was only the elites who were shipped off to exile, the rulers, the politicians, the wealthy merchants, the priests, the scholars. Left behind were the farmers, the laborers, the rural villagers, the lower merchants, and the like. Over the time of the Babylonian exile, the two groups drifted apart from each other. When they were reconnected, they no longer saw each other as part of the same community. The Judeans considered themselves the true Israelites because they had kept the faith alive through exile in a foreign land. They had stayed true to Jerusalem, even when Jerusalem had been conquered. The Samaritans, on the other hand, had created a new temple on a new mountain, and had worshiped the one God there. As the ones who had never left, who had continued to worship God in Israel, just on a different mountain, they saw themselves as the true Israelites. By the time of Jesus, this conflict had been going on for centuries. Interestingly enough, it is still going on. There are still just under 800 Samaritans living in Israel and while they are legally considered a branch of Judaism and are drafted into the Israel Defense Force just like any other resident of Israel, in order to be recognized as a Jew, they are still required to go through a formal conversion process. And in deference to the truth that there’s nothing new under the sun, let us also acknowledge that we Christians also have a history of battling with other Christians about who is really a Christian. This wasn’t unique to first century Palestinians, it isn’t unique to Judaism. This is like, a thing we do as people.
Moral of the story, James and John really think they have some justification for getting rid of this village of Samaritans. After all, they reasoned, the message of Jesus wasn’t for the Samaritans; it was for the true Israelites. If the Samaritans weren’t going to help them in spreading the message of Jesus, then better to just get them out of the way, for the good of the movement.
But what Jesus knew, and James and John didn’t understand yet, was that the Jesus movement was way bigger than the political freedom of the Judeans from Rome. The Jesus movement was about changing the way the world, the whole world, related not to Rome but to God. It was about toppling the structure of sin and death itself and leading to a new path of life and hope and freedom. A message of grace that was to be spread, as we will hear in Acts, not just in Jerusalem, but in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The Samaritans couldn’t be destroyed because the Samaritans were a crucial part of what God was about to accomplish in the redemption of the world. Samaria was a link on the chain of freedom that started in Jerusalem and spread outward, like ripples in a pond when a stone is dropped in. This village may not have received Jesus now, but they would. They just weren’t ready yet. And that was OK. Jesus could wait. What’s a few more months, or years, or even centuries, to the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the One who Is, and who Was and who Is to Come.
But waiting isn’t passive. Jesus walking away and letting the Samaritans not receive him was not Jesus letting the Samaritans or John and James and the rest of the disciples off the hook. Agreeing to disagree is not passive ignoring; it is actively being called into relationship with one another to learn from each other’s differences and from those differences to grow in one’s own understanding. Agreeing to disagree is about remaining in relationship with the person with whom we disagree, continuing to ask questions, seeking to understand their position, and allowing our own minds to be changed. We may never come to agree, but we may find that the truth is neither our opinion nor theirs, but somewhere in the middle.
This is hard, this is super hard. The second half of our Gospel lesson for today talks about just how hard it is to be a disciple of Jesus. It is not all puppies and sunshine and rainbows. The Bible, as much as we might wish it would be, is not a magic answer book of everything we need to know. In this section Jesus seems to be telling these would-be followers that even having him right in front of them, in the flesh, telling them what to do still doesn’t make it clear how to be a disciple. But what I think this passage does say, is that even knowing we’re not going to get it right all the time. Even knowing we’re going to make mistakes, even knowing we’re going to fail and fall short and hurt people’s feelings and mess up the mission. Even knowing all of that should not cause us to be afraid to go forward. Perfectionism, thinking we have to have everything perfectly figured out before we step forward, is not ministry, it is paralysis.
Our Gospel reading for today ends with this final saying from Jesus, “No one who puts hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” At first reading, this seems so harsh. But it’s an agricultural metaphor, as Jesus frequently made in the very agrarian setting he was teaching in. And so here’s a thing I learned this week about plowing that I didn’t know before, having never in my life operated a plow. The only way to plow a straight line is to have your attention focused totally in front of you. If you look back while running a plow to check your work, you will lose sight of the direction and your furrow will end up crooked. I read this not to say that we don’t have to look back and deal with the past, but that we cannot let our concern with getting things right paralyze our future. I see this command by Jesus as a command to step forward in faith, knowing that we will not get it right, that we will make mistakes, that our furrows may crook, but trusting that somehow in our imperfections, God will make crops grow in the crooked furrows of our lives, if only we have the power to keep on stepping. It won’t happen all at once. But throughout the rest of Luke and Acts, James and John and the rest of the disciples found their understanding of the Samaritans changed from unwelcome outsiders to essential partners in the spreading of grace, and the Samaritans too found themselves moved from rejecting Jesus to embracing God’s message. God’s time is not our time, but as the Psalmist wrote in our Psalm this morning, “You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
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