I understand there can be turning points of monumental consequence not only in the life of individuals but also of congregations, such as today.  The Gospel lesson represents a turning point of monumental consequence in Jesus’ ministry.  The lesson begins, “When the days drew near when it was time to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”

Jesus’ face had been engaged with the people and places of his homeland, Galilee.  Galilee was the easy phase of his ministry.  Galilee was the place of his birth.  It was home where Joseph taught him to use a saw and take a thick tree branch and plane it smooth and square; home where Mary with her mother’s heart watched him grow in wisdom.  Galilee was where his cousins came to see the call in him that was deep and long and lasting.  There are places on the map and places in the heart.  For Jesus, Galilee was rural, quiet, and safe while Jerusalem was urban, busy and violent.  Jesus could have spent the rest of his ministry in Galilee teaching scripture, healing bodies and souls, blessing children.  If he followed his heart, he could have had a good life without attracting anyone’s attention, but he turned and steadfastly set his face toward Jerusalem because he followed another force. 

Jerusalem literally means the place of peace, but it hardly meant peace for Jesus.  For Jesus to turn his face toward Jerusalem, meant for him to face a seething cauldron of intrigue and denial, death and destruction.  The Greek literally means he made his face like flint to face Jerusalem.

His disciples expected him to go back home.  They weren’t foolish.  They could imagine their lives with him amid the peace and tranquility of rural Palestine, along the Galilean sea with its pleasant breezes.  They knew that going to Jerusalem was like spilled gasoline and a lighted match.  One false move, one provocative sermon, one naming of evil and their little band dedicated to peace, joy and love would be destroyed in a seething fire of hate and mob psychology.  

He set his face like flint toward Jerusalem and his followers were afraid.  Who wouldn’t be? Shouldn’t they turn back?  Life is hard and stressful enough without plunging into more of it, meddling in the world’s injustice, making oneself vulnerable to the heartache and need of a world so hungry for compassion.

Why must the spiritual quest involve so many struggles?  Why must spirituality and struggle be so intertwined?  Most of us imagine the spiritual quest as finding that place of centeredness and tranquility, of comfort for our bruises, compassion for our hurts, an oasis of safety away from a world with its dog-eat-dog relentless demands for productivity and efficiency.  We come to church to get an inoculation of peace for another week in a world that can be so cruel.  Yet, here, Jesus says the spiritual quest, our destiny in God, is to engage in struggle, to face our Jerusalems. 

There are Galilees of the heart.  They have their place in our spiritual journeys: quiet walks along lapping seashores with cool breezes, treading down country lanes far away from the grime and dirt, heartache and struggle of cities; mountaintop experiences far above the injustice and brutality of a world in love with hate and captured by fear.

But Jesus chose the other path; he set his face toward Jerusalem.  There he would go and flip over the tables that had turned faith into a commodity.  There he would go into the city of peace that kills the prophets and stones those whom God sent.  He would confront the leaders who stuck their dirty fingers into the wounds of the people’s fear and turned them into mindless mobs.  He would go to the city, to Jerusalem, and pray until sweat dripped from his face like blood.  “Not my will, but thy will be done.”

“Thy will be done.”  That’s the other choice, the choice by which all of life is distilled.  Two roads diverge on the spiritual journey: one way is to take the easy path, the other is to obey the will of God.  To choose God’s way is to struggle with, be wounded by, and embrace the God of steadfast love who takes us to places we never imagined, down pathways yet unseen.  This God stretches the boundaries of our imagination.  This God takes our wounds and heals them so that they become our deepest source of strength.  This God stretches before us visions of a new humanity where love is the rule and compassion a way of life.  “Into your hands, O God, I commend my spirit,” Jesus says as he breathes his last, and he expects his prayer to be ours as well.

A building erupts in flames with people inside.  One person flees instinctively to save his skin and the other reaches for a higher power and enters in to rescue those trapped.  Shall it be Galilee or Jerusalem?  Shall it be the love of self or the love of God?

We face a world of immense bigotry, of tribalism, where one group, one nation, one culture, one power clique, or one religious truth, tries to save its life through the safety of hunkering in and protecting its own kind with myths of superiority and exceptionalism, a type of fleeing to the haven of Galilee where one is among one’s own type and kin and clan.  But the God of all encompassing love exposes these myths as inherently destructive of humanity.  The God of love judges our limited loyalties and stretches us into a new loyalty of God’s inclusive love that knows no boundaries.  Shall it be Galilee or Jerusalem?  We must choose. 

In Jerusalem, fears are squarely faced, sin is exposed and defeated.  Our propensity for self-delusion is squarely faced because God is obeyed.  In Jerusalem, we set our faces toward injustice, disease, and suffering.  We allow God’s healing to work in us, and we struggle to make a better world, always confident that God’s love is seeing us through.  It is an awesome and fearful thing to cast your life into the care of God and into a future that is yet unseen, laying it all in God’s hands. 

Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem and he invites us to follow, to face our destiny.  One says, “O first let me go back and say goodbye to the folks” and he says, “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Another says, “I’ll follow you, but first let me go back and bury my father,” and he says "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”  He looks at fear and our hesitation, our desire to look back and enshrine what will never again be, and he says, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Today, the kingdom of God has been fulfilled in your hearing.  As he sets his face toward Jerusalem, obeying the will of God, we turn and we follow.  And the world is changed and we are changed forever.  Amen.

(c) Copyright 2007 by Mark K. Smutny.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.