“I MUST BE ON MY WAY”
Here we are, in the early part of
Lent, and our readings now start to direct us slowly but surely towards the
coming Passion and the Cross.
The passage we have just heard from
Luke’s Gospel shows the Pharisees in a rather unusual light. Here they are
giving Jesus a quiet tip-off: they tell him that King Herod is already plotting
to kill him, and they advise him to go away. Now it’s possible that these
Pharisees were genuinely trying to be helpful; though it’s also possible that they
were being used to warn him off: “get out, or else”. We don’t really know, and
it doesn’t make much difference anyway.
It’s Jesus’s response that is
interesting. He refuses to be scared off, he refuses to be hurried along; he
knows the path he has to follow, and he will follow it come what may. There is
a sense of calm determination about his words: Listen, I am casting out
demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish
my work. He is under no illusions about what awaits him, but everything in
its time, and for the time being he will not be deflected from his path:
Today, tomorrow and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible
for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.
Luke’s Gospel has very much this
feeling of Jesus’s calm determination to follow the path that has been set
before him. Earlier on, he tells us: when the time drew near for him to be
taken up, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem. And from that point on,
Luke’s account has a feeling of inexorable progression towards the coming dénouement
in Jerusalem. There is a strong sense of tragic inevitability.
Although on this occasion, Jesus
refused to follow the advice of the Pharisees, there are times when it is right
to heed warnings, to take people’s advice, to get out of danger and follow the
way of prudence. Perhaps nine times out of ten, the way of prudence is the
right way: God does not want his people to suffer, he does not want them
to seek martyrdom.
But then there are other times when
it is right to ignore warnings, to go ahead regardless. Or rather, not to ignore
warnings but to listen to them, to weigh them prayerfully, but then to decide
that you are nonetheless called to go on despite the risks. There is at such
times a feeling of being constrained in the Lord, a feeling that this is the
path we have to tread even though it may turn out to be the way of the cross.
There are times when it is right to
escape from danger. Even Jesus was prepared to do this. John tells us, shortly
before he comes to the Passion narrative, that Jesus departed and hid from
them. And then we might think of Paul who did not hesitate to escape from a
plot to kill him in Damascus by getting his friends to lower him down from the
city walls in a basket.
But then there are other times when
it is right to refuse the advice of those who want to save us from ourselves,
when we should insist on going ahead regardless, even if it means knowingly
walking into danger. Take the example of Paul again: in different
circumstances, he refused more than once to take the most insistent advice of
the local churches to abandon his plans to visit Jerusalem. And just as they
had predicted, he was indeed arrested, and this led in the fulness of time to
his martyrdom in
Many Christians since have been
faced with this kind of choice. We might think of a twentieth-century martyr,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His story is well known. He was a Lutheran pastor in
Germany and his teaching brought him into conflict with the Nazis; he opposed
the persecution of the Jews and was forced to leave Germany in the 1930’s. He
became well known abroad as a teacher and lecturer, especially in the United
States. When it became clear that war was coming, his friends urged him
pressingly to be sensible and to stay on in safety in the USA. But he did not
take their advice. He felt that God was calling him to stay with his opposition
church in Germany, and so he took one of the last ships back to Germany just
before the outbreak of the war.
He knew full well what the risks
were, and sure enough he ended up in a concentration camp and was hanged just a
month before it was liberated.
And many brave people today speak
out for justice in places where it would be wise to shut up and keep quiet. Other
brave people go into conflict zones as peace observers or mediators and
sometimes end up being injured or taken hostage. Often there is controversy
about such cases: it is certainly foolhardy to ignore the advice of Ministries
of Foreign Affairs who urge such people to get out; and yet sometimes they feel
that they have to stay, they can do no other.
In the end, only the individual can
decide, in their conscience, before God, whether or not it is right to ignore
the warnings. Others, such as ourselves, should avoid
making judgments about those who have to take such gut-wrenching decisions.
Jesus’s disciples thought of course
that it was quite OK for Jesus to go on to
Even when Jesus tried to tell them
that it was going to quite different from what they imagined, they didn’t
really take any notice. It is so easy to hear only what we want to hear. When
they did begin to grasp that Jesus’s understanding of what was going to happen
was very different from theirs, they protested violently: God forbid,
said Peter, this shall never happen to you. They felt let down, as if
they had been led into a trap; it just couldn’t be true.
And Jesus responds by addressing
Peter as “Satan”, no less. Because Peter, in trying to deflect Jesus from the
path that he knew he had to follow, was simply repeating the temptations that
Jesus had gone through in the wilderness. Remember that at the end of Luke’s
account of the temptations, he tells us that the devil departed from him
until an opportune time. And one such opportune time was clearly this one
when Peter spoke the words of the Tempter.
Most of us, pray God, will probably
not be faced with such extreme situations and such gut-wrenching decisions as
Jesus and his disciples or indeed Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others like him. But
all of us are likely from time to time in our Christian lives to feel ourselves
constrained in the Lord to take some course of action, some costly or perhaps
risky form of service, that sensible people will advise us against.
Then the voice of prudence says:
don’t do it, draw back before you get into deep water, you don’t know what
you’re getting yourself into. And often it will be right to follow the voice of
prudence.
But sometimes the voice of prudence
is not the voice of God but the voice of the Tempter. Sometimes it is right to
go ahead, not in the sense of throwing caution to the winds, but because we
truly believe that, despite what people say, this course of action is the call
of God. At such times we have the conviction that this is the path we have to
tread; and that if we allow ourselves to be deflected from it, we shall be
deliberately refusing to hear God’s call.
The Reverend John
Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy,
4 March 2007.
Year C, Lent 2.
Gospel: Luke 13.31-35