Setting One’s Face to Jerusalem
Ash Wednesday – 2025
Luke 9:51-62
Rev. Amy P. McCullough, PhD
Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem. Nine chapters into Luke’s gospel, when Jesus is thirty-odd years of age, having been a traveling teacher and healing for a few months or a few years, Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, the city of his death. After journeying through the villages of Galilee, he makes a hard right turn southward in the direction of the holy city. He orients his life toward its end.
The road from Galilee to Jerusalem travels through Samaria, a region hostile to Jewish travelers. So, it is no surprise that a Samaritan village does not lay out a welcome mat for the Son of God. Yet the reason for their refusal is not the lingering tensions between two hostile tribes, but because Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem. The courage to walk toward death makes others uncomfortable.
Perhaps because the first rejection always stings the most, the followers walking alongside Jesus assure him they will not be falling away. “I will follow whenever you go,” says one. “I will follow you,” repeats another. And when walking beside the Lord of life, the healer of every ill, a beloved child filled with the light of God, what does one want to do, but follow?
But following Jesus is not as simple as an enthusiastic “Yes” when the trip begins, a “Yes” whose good will can carry you the length of the journey. When the car is packed, the suitcase loaded on the roof-rack, when the GPS is programmed and the open road beckons it is easy to be excited, to say “this trip is going to be unbelievable!” until the road curves, the weather changes, the days start to feel ominous, and the food supply runs low. Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, a city that kills its prophets. He wants those who walk in step alongside him to know the risks, to be ready for the costs.
The word “follow” is repeated three times in these short verses. And each possibility of following is met with a condition necessary to follow. If you follow me, you will not have anywhere to lay your head. If you are to follow me, you must begin immediately to proclaim the kingdom of God. If you follow me, you must keep moving forward. Uncompromising words. Two themes emerge in Jesus’s caution: homelessness and priorities. Homelessness because the Son of Man does not lay his head in one space, does not exist in comfortable beds or luxury hotels, but is always on the move, pushing toward the out-of-the-way places, willing to meet the hurting and hopeless on the dusty street corners and ragged rocks of life. Are you willing, O follower, to be at home as a wanderer of the world, a companion to the vulnerable, the unwashed and smelly, the ones made ragged by life?
Second, Jesus names a priority shift required of disciples. Two of the would-be followers express a desire to be on Jesus’s journey but their need to do something else first. I’m coming, they say, but first let me go to this. These “but first” tasks are important ones: loving farewells, dignified burials. Jesus challenges them both. Underneath the challenge is a probing question: Will you put me first? Will you give to me the loves in your life, the priorities of your work, the starred tasks on your To Do list, not because these tasks are unimportant but because discipleship requires inviting Jesus to reshuffle our priorities. Disciples confess to Jesus, “I trust you to order our lives.”
The journey to Jerusalem, says Justo Gonzalez, has a parallel in the church’s journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter. Tonight, we too set our faces toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, seeing death in order to experience resurrected life.
Five years ago this week, the COVID pandemic truly hit the United States; beginning a national shut down that lasted far longer than any of us imagined when it began. In a study published recently titled “How COVID remade America,” David Wallace-Wells argues that much of the changes that have happened in our culture came because of our collective inability to accept our individual vulnerability to the disease or to process the large number of deaths happening around us. He writes, “we turned inward, then we turned on one another. America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional.”
Lent is the season to face our mortality, to see death, and deathly forces for what they are: strong, unsettling, destructive. It is not a season to turn inward but onward to Christ. Jesus set his face to Jerusalem. He walked into the deadly forces, the evil powers, the weak resolves, the bad intentions, the inward fears and insecurities that cause people to abandon one another and do cruel things. Jesus walked straight into the city that holds humanity’s manifestations of our deadly, broken, sinful world, in order to absorb it all into himself, and by God’s great power, defeat them and set us free.
So we set our faces toward Jerusalem, willing to give up the easy comforts of a contained life to be truthful about the horrors around us. Ready to practice the hospitality, strength of neighborliness that is an antidote to self-interested, transactional world. We walk not alone, but beside Jesus and with one another. We journey not afraid but assured of our end, for our destination that is nothing less than God and God’s loving life set free in us. Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem. And so shall we.