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It must, therefore, have been a lonely journey, and it would become lonelier still.

En route he gave them more hints on occasion, he would spell it out in words that could not possibly have been misunderstood, yet still the disciples “did not grasp what was said” (Luke 10:34). He had already explained that to them (Luke 9:44), but they neither understood nor wanted to understand. He came or journeyed “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). While Jesus’ odyssey has the city of Jerusalem as its geographical destination, it becomes clear that its real purpose is accomplishing our salvation through his death and resurrection. So perhaps Luke, himself the most educated on the Gospel writers, was echoing the journey motif in classical literature (like Homer’s Odyssey, named after its central character Odysseus, King of Ithica, and in turn lending its title to any epic journey).

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He was writing for someone called “Theophilus.” If Theophilus was a real person (the name means “Friend of God” and so could simply be code language for any Christian), he was probably both well off and well educated. The journey is the spine that holds the whole narrative together.Įxactly why Luke did this is not very clear.

Here, from the moment Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) everything takes place within the context of a single journey. In Matthew, the journey of the Son of God causes others to go on journeys: at the opening of the Gospel Magi journey from the east to Christ and at its end the apostles journey from Christ to the ends of the earth.īut it is in Luke’s Gospel that the journey motif comes into its own. In Mark’s Gospel, the story is compressed into the last three years of our Lord’s life everything seems to happen “immediately.” It is a breathless journey. There the Son of God travels the vast distance between the world in which he is “with” or “face to face with” God to the world in which he “became flesh” and lived “face to face” with us. The journey motif is present in different ways in each of the four Gospels. How different the Son of God in his incarnation. That elderly lady was not prepared to travel for a few miles to see a place she had heard was beautiful. I sometimes think of that afternoon when, by way of contrast, I reflect on the journey the Son of God took when he came “to seek and to save the lost”. I still wish that I had been able to take her on what would have been, for her, a memorable journey. The place she wanted to see had a beauty all of its own. Neighbors told me that if a ball of string had been tied to her ankle the day she was born, with enough string to stretch for a mile, it would never have been fully unwound. “No,” she said, “I don’t want to go I’d just like to know what it’s like.” “Let’s get into my car and I’ll take you,” I said. One afternoon I visited an elderly lady and as we talked she asked me what another place on the island was like–it was at the south end of the island, only five miles away from where she lived. I was a minister on a very small, remote Scottish island. Very few people we meet have never been on a journey-though I did know one of them, many years ago. Some have brought gladness, others sadness. Most of us have made journeys that have been memorable.

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