Brave Enough - Friday Devotional
A devotional written by Rev. Roy Atwood
Luke 9:51-62 (CEB)
As the time approached when Jesus was to be taken up into heaven, he determined to go to Jerusalem. He sent messengers on ahead of him. Along the way, they entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his arrival, but the Samaritan villagers refused to welcome him because he was determined to go to Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to consume them?” But Jesus turned and spoke sternly to them, and they went on to another village.
As Jesus and his disciples traveled along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds in the sky have nests, but the Human One has no place to lay his head.”
Then Jesus said to someone else, “Follow me.”
He replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead. But you go and spread the news of God’s kingdom.”
Someone else said to Jesus, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say good-bye to those in my house.”
Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand on the plow and looks back is fit for God’s kingdom.”
The third gospel in the New Testament, Luke, is an eloquent literary composition describing Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Throughout the narrative, Luke emphasizes Jesus’s compassion for the needy, the sick, the brokenhearted, and the outcast. More so than the other gospel authors, Luke insists that Jesus’s teachings are universal and addressed to all people. Scholars believe that Luke was written sometime between 80 and 90 AD.
As Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem, a shift occurs. The story gains momentum - no longer a wandering ministry but a purposeful journey. Each encounter along the road carries urgency, a weight that startles us with its sharpness. We meet people who long to follow, but whose requests feel deeply human: to bury a parent, to say goodbye. Jesus’s responses can sound abrupt, even cruel. However, this passage is not about dismissing grief or dishonoring family. It’s about what changes when we stand at the edge of something holy, something costly, something that will not wait.
Jesus is not rejecting mourning - after all, he weeps at Lazarus’s tomb, sees the widow in her loss, and honors his own mother from the cross. But here, in this moment, he invites a different kind of mourning: a release of what was, in order to enter what is becoming. The call is not about denying love for one’s family - it’s about realizing that love may look different when shaped by the kingdom. Even our most cherished rituals and rhythms might give way to something new.
Each response Jesus gives carries a tension: between shelter and displacement, between tradition and transformation, between memory and mission. He names the cost with clarity, not to shame or repel, but to prepare - to let those who would follow him know that the path ahead will unsettle them. It will uproot their assumptions. It will require more than admiration. It will ask for trust that reaches beyond what feels reasonable.
Following Jesus is not always easy, but it is always honest. In his gaze toward Jerusalem, he reveals a love that refuses to be shallow - a love that walks through rejection, through sacrifice, and ultimately through death, in order to bring life. May we be brave enough to walk with him.
- Rev. Roy Atwood, Associate Minister of Finance and Administration