Keep your eyes on the road - Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 9: 51 - 62

Back seat drivers - don’t you love them! Well I am married to such a person. When I am in the driver’s seat, as my head begins to move around with my eyes looking at things to either side of the car, I am regularly given the abrupt message;

“Keep your eyes on the road!”

Now it goes without saying that I respond to this with a sharp retort followed by the moodiest silence that I can muster.

And yet (don’t let her know that I have admitted this) I have to concede that she is normally right. For the danger with my attention span being at a level of an under developed amoeba is that my drifting across the road may eventually put myself and others at mortal risk.

“Keep your eyes on the road!”

You know, it’s a bit like that with our following Jesus. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we are called on to give up our capacity for rational thinking or in any way to become Christian automatons. No way! But it does suggest that we have to develop a sense of focus as we live out our spiritual lives.

And such a need is by no means new. Indeed it is at the heart of the Gospel reading we have heard this evening. And I want for us to glimpse two ways in which we can be blown of course.

The first danger comes with a misplaced enthusiasm. The context we find offered to us by Luke is that Jesus has met with rejection in a Samaritan town. These Samaritans would be the descendants of a mixture of Jews whom the conquering Assyrian seven and a half centuries earlier had deemed too insignificant to deport to Babylon, and the Gentile people whom the Assyrians had settled in Palestine. Bitter rivalry between Jews and Samaritans had existed for half a millenia. And yet, in Luke’s Gospel, we normally see a good relationship between Jesus and Samaritans.

But here, that harmony comes to an end because Jesus was heading to Jerusalem where many a Samaritan grievance was directed. Now James and John, Sons of Thunder, live up to their reputations. They have seen Jesus rejected and so they seek payback time;

“Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them.”

Chill at those words for those are the words of religious fanaticism, that belief that justifies violence in the name of that which is perceived as truth. It is the voice of twisted religion and yet sickeningly it is a voice that has been heeded by zealous followers of every religion at various points in history.

Too often today, we think of fanaticism merely in terms of Islam and whilst Islam has its fair share of problems to face, it is hardly alone. Christian anti Semitism has reared its head with devastating results down the years leading to a Holocaust. The crusader mentality has threatened particularly Muslims in the East. And in the founding of the Americas, conversion has all too often come with the threat of bloodshed. Indeed, we have barely scratched the surface of that particular tragedy.

But here, Jesus rejects such voices of fanatical violence. He is not in the business of coercion. For his way is to be the path of loving rather than of hating. He is in the business of building bridges rather than erecting walls. He rejects once and for all that darkest of myths, the myth of redemptive violence which sees violence as a means by which good is done.

One of the greatest dangers that faces Christianity today is the temptation to resort to a bunker mentality that sees threats all around. The mentality that sees as enemies all those who think differently or who adopt a different lifestyle, is a mentality which however devoutly held is in conflict with the way of Jesus.

May God deliver us from unthinking fanaticism that diverts us from the path of Christ.

But then there is a very different diversion. It is the diversion of half hearted discipleship. This may be the following of Jesus which is done with a good understanding but it fails to give following Jesus the priority that it demands. Here we find people with a good and proper desire to follow Jesus but they keep looking back. They have unfinished business before they can follow Jesus.
This is one of those scriptures in which Jesus seems to be upping the demands in a way that we find disconcerting. Let’s just see them one by one.

Firstly a man says to Jesus;

“I will follow you wherever you go.”

So far so good we might say. But Jesus replies by saying;

“Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of God has nowhere to lay his head.”

What is Jesus playing at? Well perhaps he is drawing the man’s attention to the insecurities of being a follower of Jesus. For just as Jesus lived out his ministry in a state of radical dependence, so too will the follower be in a situation in which he may miss out on the things that attract the highly aspirational. To follow Jesus means being on a journey in which we put comforts and notions of success on the backburner for Jesus himself let these things go.

Next another man says to Jesus;

“Lord first let me go and bury my father.”

Fair enough, most of us would reply but Jesus responds;

“Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

And everyone of you knows that if I said this to someone recently bereaved, I would soon be looking for a new job and rightly so. After all, to bury one’s parents is the last act of honour that we can give them and is something that Jewish people certainly took seriously.

I can only conclude that there is an element of shock treatment here. Maybe we sometimes put family or religious duties ahead of the Kingdom of God. And to correct this excuse for not getting on with God’s Kingdom, Jesus throws out the hyperbole big time.

But he’s not finished yet. For there is another man who says to him;

“I will follow you Lord; but first let me go back and say good-bye to my family.”

Once more it sounds reasonable but Jesus is having none of it;

“No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God.”

Wow! Even Elijah allowed Elisha to say farewell to his folks. This sounds unreasonable but is it?

Well in one sense it is but in another sense, Jesus is reminding them that to follow him means keeping our eyes on the road. If I drive with my eyes looking back through the mirror, I will never be fully committed to going forwards. And that is what this teaching is all about. To reduce it to literalism is as is so often the case, to do a violence to Scripture. We know that Jesus is committed to community and family - his own life shows this - but too often these things are used as excuses that act as barriers to the path of radical discipleship to which Jesus calls us. That discipleship will inevitably draw us into a wider circle than merely Me and Mine. It draws us into a communion with all the losers and sufferers in our world for it is with such people that Jesus is to be found.

Jesus calls on you and me to follow him unconditionally. If we place conditions, our discipleship is of no use. But as we give ourselves to Jesus and his Kingdom, we do so to a community that must be rooted in love even when such is contrary to our instincts. It is indeed a serious and demanding calling. No wonder we need the important warning;

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

In a few minutes we shall respond to the invitation of Jesus to come to his Table. There we once more are connected to his love and there we receive his help. For that help is absolutely necessary if we are to be the all loving ever faithful followers of Jesus that we are called to be. For we know that we need all the help we can get to;

“Keep our eyes on the road.”


This sermon was preached at Northam Methodist Church on Sunday July 1st 2007