Jesus sent his disciples out on a mission trip. He gave them power and authority to proclaim the kingdom and to cure diseases (Luke 9:1-2). They were not to take along any financial resources, but would be wholly dependent on the hospitality of strangers (9:3-4) – which they might not always receive. And when they did not, they were simply to shake the dust from their feet as they left one town and headed toward another (9:5).

But since Jesus had given them authority to heal, James and John thought maybe Jesus would give them authority to destroy as well. There was a Samaritan village that had refused to provide hospitality for Jesus and the twelve, and they proposed that Jesus could give them permission to call down fire from heaven to burn up that village that failed to welcome them (9:52-54). Their request earned them a stern rebuke from Jesus (9:55).

(When Luke wrote this, he just said Jesus “rebuked them.” Wouldn’t you like to know what he said, when he rebuked them? Your Bible might have a footnote that tells you that “other ancient authorities” supply some further information. What it means is this. A century or more after Luke had published his gospel, there was a preacher or commentator working from this text, who wrote a few words in the margin of the book as a guess about what the content of that rebuke might have been: “you do not know what spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy the lives of human beings, but to save them.” Some time after that, a scribe picked up this copy of the Gospel of Luke, saw the note in the margin and thought it was a correction to supply the text that had accidentally been left out. Then that copyist made a copy with those words incorporated into the main body of the text: and so those extra words have come down to us. Again, these words were not part of Luke’s original account; they come from a century or two later; but they show that just like us today, ancient Christians were curious about what Jesus might have said when he rebuked James and John.)

Like James and John, we sometimes assume that it would be a good idea for Jesus to entrust to us the authority to call down fire from heaven on those we feel deserve it. Yet we are often not too self-aware: we often fail to realize that while we might want to rain destruction on those other sinners, we ourselves have irritated plenty of people who would be happy to rain destruction on us as sinners who deserve punishment.

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On the other hand, Lord, you are on record as loving sinners, with deep compassion: sinners like James and John, sinners like those inhospitable Samaritans, sinners like us. In your compassion transform our hearts, we pray, that we also may become people of compassion.