Easter 2024 - Part 1

Luke chapter 9 and uses the phrase, “He set his face towards Jerusalem.”

Luke is referring here to Jesus and his resolute focus on the holy city with the direction of Luke’s gospel hinging on these words. Once Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem, everything that follows falls in the shadow of this idea.

The city of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was many things. But most importantly, Jerusalem was the site of the holy temple and was understood to be the exact place on earth where the God of the universe had chosen to meet with his people. Jerusalem itself was seen as being the literal embodiment of the pulling together of heaven and earth. 

Right after Jesus “sets his face towards Jerusalem," he and his disciples are met with aggressive inhospitality as they pass through a Samaritan town. The Samaritans hated the impenetrable institutions and inaccessible hierarchies surrounding the temple and they rejected the temple in Jerusalem as the sole seat of God’s power, instead declaring their own Mount Gerizim and the temple on it as their personal center of religious life. 

The disciples get their feelings hurt when the Samaritans are not hospitable toward them and ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Jesus rebukes them and they continue on to another town. 

Jesus does NOT rebuke the Samaritans. He confronts the disciples for adopting an all too familiar posture, a holier than thou attitude that declared, “We are the chosen few and those unsophisticated, uneducated, unclean Samaritans, they should all do us a favor and die.”

Jesus understood this insidious demonization of the Samaritans. He also understood the Samaritan’s inhospitality to be a forgivable misunderstanding.

Jesus' slow march to the holy city was not to reinforce the elitist hierarchies of the temple. It was Jesus expanding the presence of God for all, with the site of the temple shifting from the physical building onto Jesus’ own body. And so Jesus himself becomes the physical embodiment of the pulling together of heavens and earth and ultimately makes himself available to the Samaritans, Jews and everyone alike.

 

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