On the Inside of the Discipleship Project (Luke 9:51-62)
On the Inside of the Discipleship Project
June 29, 2025
Church in the Park
Luke 9:51-62
By: Pastor Mike
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Chapter 9 verse 51 marks a major narrative pivot in Luke’s Jesus story. He writes that Jesus “determined to journey to Jerusalem.” After establishing a popular ministry of healing and teaching in the northern region of Israel known as Galilee, a ministry that occupies chapters 4 through 9 of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus began a long journey south toward the city where he would “be betrayed into human hands” (9:44). Aware of the unjust treatment and the suffering awaiting him in Jerusalem, Jesus nevertheless committed to the path.
This development occurs about halfway through a string of stories in chapters 9 and 10 that explore the theme of discipleship. Luke 9 opens with Jesus sending out the twelve disciples in pairs to practice ministry. He “gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal” (9:1-2). Upon their return, Jesus guides them toward a deserted place so they can rest and tell him about their time in the field. But a crowd of needy people catches wind of where they are and crashes their retreat. Jesus receives them compassionately, teaching and healing them, and at the end of the day he multiplied a meager amount of food to feed more than 5,000 of them to the point of satisfaction.
Next comes a story about Jesus, sometime later, asking the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “The Messiah of God” (9:20). In response, Jesus, for the first time, teaches the Twelve that he will have to “undergo great suffering” (9:22) in order to fulfil his Messianic work. He tells them somberly that, in order to experience true life, they will need to lose their lives for his sake and “take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:23).
This is followed in rapid successes by the Transfiguration, a story about Peter, James, and John witnessing Jesus’ divine glory revealed on a mountaintop, a second teaching about the suffering to come, and an argument among the disciples about which of them is the greatest and most important. Jesus – no surprise here – tells them to knock it off, and he directs their attention to a small child and tells them that the goal of discipleship is to become childlike and to welcome children.
At last we arrive at these scenes which are our focus for today. Jesus makes that critical shift toward Jerusalem. His disciples are bound to go in whatever direction Jesus “sets his face,” while three unnamed individuals hesitate about whether or not they want to follow him.
Luke closes this deep exploration of discipleship with the opening story of chapter 10, which mirrors the opening story of chapter 9. Now that he has reached Samaria, Jesus appoints seventy of his followers to go ahead of him in pairs to all the towns and villages that he intends to visit. As they go to find out where he will be welcomed, they are to herald his coming with their own ministries of – once again, notice the pattern – healing sicknesses and preaching about the nearness of God’s kingdom.
So we have these two narrative bookends. In the first, Jesus sends the Twelve throughout Galilee to preach and heal; in the second, he sends 70 others out to do the same thing in unfamiliar territory. Both stories highlight the core things disciples do or don’t do. They don’t take along a lot of provisions or possessions, which means that they do depend on the hospitality of others. They meet people where they are and eat what is set before them. They preach about the kingdom, and they heal people from disease or demon possession. When they are not welcome in a place, they don’t react violently; they simply shake the dust off their sandals on their way out of town as a testimony against that place, and move on.
Between those two bookends are episodes that show what it means to be a disciple – one who follows behind the teacher without reservation – going where he goes, doing what he does, submitting to what he submits to. Discipleship is thrilling. It’s risky. It’s all-encompassing. It’s daily. But—if you’ve left everything to follow him, the promise is that it’s worth more than anything else in all the world.
The closing scenes in chapter 9 which mark Jesus’ and – therefore his disciples’ – determination to go to Jerusalem, bring to the forefront the foundation of unreserved commitment, of complete readiness to follows, on which everything else that makes a life of discipleship is built.
When Jesus began travelling to Jerusalem, he had to pass through a region called Samaria. In the Old Testament, we are told that the kingdom of Israel, which was established under Saul, David, and Solomon, eventually fractured into two rival kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the South. These kingdoms became like estranged branches on a family tree, with their own customs, centers of gathering, and claims to be the real, authentic thing. Yet the past relationship was undeniably felt, and for that reason the present relationship was all the more fraught and painful.
The Samaritans traced their lineage back to the old Northern Kingdom, but they were not, by the time of Jesus, considered “true” Jews. They were neither true Jews nor true Gentiles. Not really insiders; not really outsiders. In between. Monstrous. John’s Gospel tells us that “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans” (4:9). But Jesus didn’t pay that either-or, black-and-white game. He had come for the sake of the whole world. He took his body, his love, and his proclamation of God’s kingdom to Samaria, much to the chagrin of his disciples.
Well, as you might imagine, not everyone in Samaria was glad he was there. Not every place was willing to host him. Jesus’ disciples, these “proper” Jews, weren’t willing to take that snubbing in stride. When Jesus learned that his first prospective site visit in Samaria was not going to happen, James and John sidled up and asked if Jesus would like them to call down fire from heaven and blow up the hostile town.
It seems extreme, but is it? If you were traveling with someone you believed as all-powerful, and you had a legitimate reason to react violently against a community with whom you’ve experienced centuries of animosity, might you just test the waters, push on the boundaries to see if there is a quick and easy way to make that problem – those people – go away for good, to justify yourself once and for all? Fire raining down from the sky. Even today, isn’t that our way of dealing with enemies – with outsiders, foreigners, religious and ethnic “others” who violate our self-righteousness and pose a threat to us? The image is even more haunting in our era of modern warfare: napalm, bunker busters, drones.
So these two zealous brothers ask Jesus to do this, “but he turned and rebuked them” (9:55) What’s Jesus response to not being welcomed? Oh, it’s very dramatic: “Then they went on to another village” (9:56). ‘Guys, we’ll just go somewhere else; of course I have no intention of putting fire into your hands.’ (Contrast this with the tongues of fire that anoint the disciples on Pentecost; fire of love, anointing that leads to the gift of languages which unites the world’s peoples.) So James and John get rebuked. Then come these three short conversations with unnamed people, which my Bible titles “Would-Be Followers of Jesus.”
Conversation 1: A person catches Jesus’ attention on the road and says, I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
Conversation 2: Jesus initiates this one. Follow me, he says to somebody. But that person said, Lord, first let me go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him, Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.
Conversation 3: Another says to Jesus, I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home. Jesus said to him, No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.
In each of these three interactions, the words “follow” is used. Important, because, again, that is the defining act of discipleship. And these conversations directly play on earlier stories of Jesus calling his first disciples to follow him. In those first call narratives, people follow Jesus immediately and without reservation. Take, for example, the calling of Levi in chapter 5: “After this [Jesus] went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at a tax booth; and he said to him Follow me. And he got up, left everything, and followed him” (Luke 5:27-28). Simple as that.
But these three unnamed people in Luke 9 are not so sure, not so ready. One’s enthusiasm and naivete is tempered by Jesus’ warning about not having a stable home; to really go with Jesus anywhere requires a full letting go of security, a willingness to live in dependency on God and others. The second responds to a direct invitation from Jesus with a request to go and do something else first. A third pipes up that he’ll follow but also needs to go do something first.
What they’re asking to do – bury or say goodbye to their relatives – seems very human and reasonable. It’s just this that highlights the radical nature of the call to discipleship. When you compile all the biblical stories of call from Old Testament to New, “doing something first” doesn’t really have a place there. It’s a red flag.
As harsh as Jesus’ words feel, the point is that discipleship doesn’t happen on our timing or on our terms. It’s following. Which is the opposite of self-determination. You go into enemy territory because Jesus goes there. You pick up the cross because Jesus picks it up. You do all of this nonviolently and without retribution because that’s the way Jesus has marked out. You can’t really do that if, from day one, you’ve asked for accommodation and reserved the right to order your own priorities.
We shake our heads and laugh at James and John’s brashness, but here’s the thing: long before this moment, they had left everything to follow Jesus. They’re on the inside of his project. They are genuine followers. They are therefore in a position to receive a real rebuke and to grow from that experience. They are deeply wrong about how to respond to the Samaritan’s lack of welcome, but they are in a safe position to be deeply wrong, because they bring their reactivity, their raw broken humanity to Jesus.
Notice: they address him as “Lord.” They ask him if he wants or desires this action. And they bear his rebuke. They’re allowed to be a mess, they can be honest about how they’d like to deal with their enemies, they are free to show their hand – because at the end of the day they’ve already thrown in their lot with their teacher, with their Lord. They will do what he tells them to do. They will follow him. Nothing else, not even their centuries-old grievance with Samaria, takes precedence.
On the other hand, these three unnamed conversation partners are not yet on the inside. They’re thinking about it. One is overly enthusiastic, two are reasonably cautious. But none of them is ready; none have committed. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth once wrote: “a limited readiness is no readiness at all in our dealings with Jesus.”[1]
What happens next is the sending of the 70. Luke is very careful to say, right on the heels of these three conversations, that “after this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him…” (10:1). Did you catch it? Seventy others. Which I take to mean, seventy people who were not these three. They had not yet called Jesus ‘Lord.’ They had not yet said Yes to him. And so they missed out on the risk, the exhilaration, the joy, the purpose to which he commissions the others; they missed out on their new family. They missed out on the opportunity to have their hearts recreated, to bear his healing rebuke, to grow in his love.
Here are a few questions I will leave us with. Questions each of us can ask of our heart:
First, am I truly following Jesus, or am I holding something back – something like a particular dimension of my life, an old wound or hatred, a need to be seen and known by the people around me in a particular way, my possessions or my family, my leisure or my work? If I am holding something back, will I ask God to give me the grace I need to surrender it?
Second, am I being honest with Jesus about what I wish would happen to the people I don’t like, who mistreat me or trample on the things I value? Am I being honest about my inner fantasies where I play out my own version of calling down fire from heaven? Am I being honest about my lack of love, so that I can be unclogged, cleansed, made ready for radical love to flow? And if I feel afraid to tell Jesus what I’m really thinking or feeling about my enemies, will I ask God for the grace I need to hold nothing back from the one I follow?
And finally, am I exercising the power he gives me to heal and proclaim the kingdom? Am I being bold to step into the ministry to which he has called me? And if I feel estranged from any meaningful ministry, will I ask God for the grace I need to say, “Here I am, send me.”
As we ask and answer these questions about surrender, confession, and ministry, may the Holy Spirit meet us, help us, and draw us toward fullness of life. Amen.
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV, 2, 535f.