Tag: Luke’s gospel

Galatians 5:1, 13-25                                                          

Luke 9:51-62                                                                      

I buried a woman once who’d grown up in Holy Cross when it was in East Weare village. Among the people who came forward to speak at her funeral was a grandson, a young man who is mildly retarded. I was a little nervous about what he might say, but his words about his grandmother were beautiful. “She called me her little tagalong,” he said. “I was always trying to follow her. I had trouble keeping up, but then she would turn and wait for me.”

I thought about what that young man said as I prayed with the gospel passage this morning. It is the beginning of the long central section of Luke’s gospel, where Luke departs from the structure of Mark’s gospel which he’s been following to this point and gives us a series of sayings and wonders set in the context of Jesus journeying to Jerusalem and his final destination on the Cross. “As the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up,” Luke begins, “he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”