Tuesday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 1, 2024

The Memorial of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Luke 9, 51-56

When the days for Jesus to be taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem, and he sent messengers ahead of him. On the way they entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there, but they would not welcome him because the destination of his journey was Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they journeyed to another village.

“When the days for Jesus to be taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.”  It is as if all that came before was but a prelude: the furious pace of his preaching, the long hours spent healing, raising the dead, and exorcizing.  The way St. Luke phrases his verse, it was not merely time for return to Jerusalem for the celebration of the Passover; it was time for something that would completely overshadow the Passover as the light of the sun obliterates the light of the stars at dawn.  John 12, 27: “For this reason I came unto this hour.”  He would let nothing and no one come between him and the work of Redemption of the human race: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me” (Matthew 16, 23).  He had waited over thirty years of his lifetime on earth to do this, and for all the generations of mankind, watching history unfold from heaven: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!  I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” (Luke 12, 49-50).

“He sent messengers ahead of him.” In order not to have to take the time to arrange lodgings and purchase food so that he could concentrate on preparing the Apostles for what was to come, he had certain disciples run up ahead into the towns through which he must pass on his way to Jerusalem.  “They entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there.”  Samaria separated Galilee from Judea so that it was almost impossible to travel between the two provinces without going through it.  “They would not welcome him because the destination of his journey was Jerusalem.”  The Samaritans were descendants of Gentiles who had gradually moved into the depopulated land of the northern kingdom of Israel after the Assyrians conquered it hundreds of years before.  They adopted the religion of the Israelites and built their own Temple.  The Jews rejected them as not being descended from the Twelve Tribes, and a great enmity existed between them.  The Jews treated them as they would Gentiles.  Thus, they could buy food from the Samaritans but would not go into their homes and would sleep outside their towns.  But the Samaritan city spoken of here would not even sell food to the Jewish disciples of Jesus because they were traveling to Jerusalem.

“Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?”  The “sons of thunder” are roused to wrath against the ungracious Samaritans: here is the Messiah, on his way to claim his throne and to crush the Roman oppressors, and this petty nation of outcasts dared to stand against him.  They saw the Lord as soon calling down fire from heaven on the Romans.  Why not begin with the Samaritans?  “Jesus turned and rebuked them.”  Luke does not say that Jesus explained his reason for not destroying the town as Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed, only that he rebuked the overzealous James and John.  Nor does he tell us exactly what he said to them.  But this was not the time for judgment.  That time will come, but now was the time for patience so that sinners might have time to repent.  “They journeyed to another village.”  That is, a village further on.  We see the Lord treat the village as he had treated Nazareth at the beginning of his Public Life when his own townspeople rejected him.  He accepts their rejection and lets them live with it.  Perhaps some would rethink what they had done.  But those who did not would have no answer for their Judge on the day of their deaths. 

The failure of the first town to welcome Jesus provided for the benefit of the next town that did receive him, and this reminds of us of how the rejection by the Jews as a whole led to the Gospel moving to the Gentiles.  As St. Paul declared to a group of the Jews in Antioch: “To you it behoved us first to speak the word of God: but because you reject it and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold we turn to the Gentiles” (Acts of the Apostles 13, 46).  And, indeed, the first bishop of Antioch after Peter, who reigned there after he left Jerusalem in the care of James, was the Gentile convert Ignatius.  

The Lord Jesus comes to each of us, looking for a welcome.  How gracious of our Lord to come to us rather than to summon us to him, as other authorities would!  How excited we should be to receive him in Holy Communion and also in prayer.  And how we should receive him right away, forgiving sins and asking forgiveness of others, and lining the ground before him with the palm branches of our faith and good works.