Luke 9:51-62
Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 29, 2025
On Sunday evenings in the early 1970s, my youth group would sing “The Wedding Banquet,” a song written in 1966 by Sister Miriam Therese Winter of the Medical Mission Sisters based on the parables of the wedding banquet (Matthew 22) and the great dinner (Luke 14). The final verse of the song says, “If we’re slow in responding, He may leave us behind. He is preparing a banquet for that great and glorious day. When the Lord and Master calls us, be certain not to say, I cannot come…” Although the song does not stem from the gospel reading for this Sunday, Luke 9:51-62, the same themes are present: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father. I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home. Pray, hold us excused, we cannot come at this moment.”
Before we consider Luke 9:51-62, it is important to remember the wider context. Luke 9:51 is a major turning point in Luke’s Gospel, as the narrator tells us, “When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” The journey to Jerusalem doesn’t end for another ten chapters, at 19:28. In the intervening space, Jesus takes a circuitous route to Jerusalem, even passing through Samaritan country. Along the way, he encounters many different people, preaches, teaches, and heals.
In his Interpretation commentary on Luke, Fred B. Craddock notes that Jesus’ meandering trip to Jerusalem “is to influence interpretation of what Jesus says and does. Jesus is preparing his disciples not only for the crisis at Jerusalem but also for continuing his work.” Craddock then applies the meaning of the text to today’s church and the life of faith, writing, “Perhaps the real journey Luke has in mind is that of the reader who is being drawn by Luke’s presentation of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem into a pilgrimage with Jesus in an unfolding and deepening way, not only to the passion but into the kingdom of God.”
Let’s get back on the road with Jesus and his disciples. The journey has an inauspicious start, with the Samaritans not receiving Jesus because of his final destination. This is certainly ironic, considering how Jesus chooses a Samaritan as the model of mercy in the very next chapter (Luke 10:25-37). However, this is not the first time in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus is rejected because of his message and ministry. In Luke 4:14-30, Jesus’s own neighbors reject him and his message and try to kill him. “But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way” (Luke 4:30).
Jesus obviously knew he and his followers would encounter rejection along the way, for he instructed his 12 disciples, “Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them” (Luke 9:5). James and John apparently had short memories, as they were anxious to command fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritan village. Jesus rebuked them and they went on to another village.
Along the way, “someone” said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” That unnamed someone invites each of us to think about what it means to follow Jesus. Jesus’s answers to his would-be followers are reminiscent of his teachings throughout Luke about the call to and cost of discipleship (see 5:1-11, 27-28; 9:1-6, 23-27; 14:25-35). Jesus’s demands are uncompromising and sound harsh. Let the dead bury their own dead? No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God? Really, Jesus? You have disciples who are apparently willing, but you squelch their budding enthusiasm with your expectations of your followers?
This is precisely the point at which we need to remember the entire context of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem in Luke 9:51-19:28. Jesus did not linger on his journey, nor was he deterred from making his way to Jerusalem. In his teaching, preaching, and healing, Jesus offered something new and immediate that called for a life-changing decision. In his blog on this lectionary text, Lutheran Pastor John Petty reminds us, “In God’s kingdom, we are not defined by our past, however, but by our future. This is why focusing on the past — maintaining obedience to traditional practices, placing one’s tradition above ‘the way’ — does not leave one ‘well-situated’ (euthetos) for the reign of God. For Luke, and for Jesus, ‘the way’ only goes forward.”
Questions for reflection on Luke 9:51-62
- What excuses do we offer when Jesus says, “Follow me”?
- How do our traditions, even our best traditions, hinder us as a church from following Jesus on the way?
- How do we weigh the cost and demands of discipleship against our other commitments and loyalties?
View the corresponding Order of Worship for the Third Sunday after Pentecost.
Sign up for worship resources in your inbox every Monday.
