Nowhere to lay his head

View from the apartment we stayed in while in Todi, Italy
on our recent vacation
In this week's Gospel reading, Someone comes up to Jesus as he and his disciples are going along the road. The person says, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus answers, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Jesus warns the one who wants to follow that he is homeless in this life. Jesus was dependent on the hospitality of others. His home base of operations was in Capernaum on the Sea of Gallilee, but he seems to have stayed there at the home of Simon Peter and others.

During our recent three-week trip to Italy and France, my wife and daughter and I greatly enjoyed the fact that we spent a week at an apartment in Todi, Italy and a week at an apartment in Villecroze, in the Provence region of France. It was so much nicer than bouncing from hotel to hotel to have our own place to which we could return and our own kitchen in which to cook meals. This highlighted for me the homelessness of Jesus. No, he wasn't homeless in the sense in which we mean it today as his life did not compare to the homeless who subsist in every large city around our country and in most countries of the world.

Jesus lived as an itinerant preacher, much more closely to the way Francis of Assisi would live more than a millinea later as he walked around Italy and beyond on preaching missions. Jesus showed through his life on the road, what Francis wanted to later mirror, that his true home was and is in the kingdom of God. Jesus needed no roof to call his own as he was just passing through on a journey intended to bring us all to where he was.

Jesus lived constantinually as the guest, dependent on the hospitality of others and yet offered hospitality himself and sometimes played the host, as at the last supper. It is to this radical dependance on God that we are called. Even those of us who own homes and love to have a roof to call our own, are to place our trust not in those places or possessions, but in God. Right?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Assisi, Italy seen from an olive grove on the way to
the church of San Damiano