Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Wednesday, March 5, 2025
by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: When Jesus calls us to follow him, he is not calling us away from those we love but to a life of loving our enemies no less than those dearest to us.
A major debate during the German Reformation was over the use of images in churches. Were images idolatrous? Or could they be retained? Some pushed aggressively for the removal of images, believing them to be idolatrous, but Martin Luther disagreed. To imagine one could do away with idolatry merely by destroying a statue or a painting was to miss the point entirely. True idolatry rested not in the thing but in the heart, in trusting something other than what God promises to us through the word.
Luther’s approach to images is the same one we should take to Jesus’s hard words concerning following him. When he tells us to forsake burying the dead and relating to our families, we misunderstand him if we think he is objecting to funeral services or farewell parties. Rather, Jesus is aiming at something much deeper than the mere act. What Jesus is criticizing is the ordering of priorities in our heart, allowing love of family to reign rather than the universal love of God. When asked what the most important source of meaning in their life was, 40% of Americans family identify spending time with family, doubling the 20% who identify religious faith. Within this landscape, it is not hard to imagine the many ways we allow our love of family to undermine the call to love our neighbors as ourselves. An immature response would be to say we should not love our families. A mature response knows that Jesus is not asking us to love those closest to us any less, but rather to love everyone no less than we love them. Faith takes away our selfish love of family so as to give it back, rightly ordered by the greater love of God for all.
When Jesus calls us to set our hands to the plow, he is endorsing this type of critical thinking. His language is stark not because our answers should be black-and-white but so that we would take these questions seriously and deeply. Consider how you can face tough questions without settling easy answers that focus only on externals. What is the deep question of the heart that Jesus is asking us to consider? For the grace of God is focused on the deepest parts of us. It pierces us at our deepest and most vulnerable with the good news that God knows each and every of our struggles and still loves us. So too, the grace of God bids us to live a life that is not only superficially attuned to this good news but wants our world to know intimately what freedom it now enjoys because of what Christ accomplished for us in Jerusalem.
