If the Pharisees’ warning to Jesus about escaping Herod’s clutches was meant to scare him, it didn’t work: He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.’”
We've been told that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem; the Pharisees seem to be trying to divert him. But he will be moved neither from his itinerary nor his agenda: the work of proclaiming and demonstrating the inbreaking Kingdom of God. His work of healing and deliverance is the work of the moment and the near future. And on the “third day” he must finish that work, showing the most complete revelation of God’s love to the world in what looks like complete defeat.
If they think he’s going to be swayed by threats of death, he makes it clear: the death he is to undergo – which, he says, could happen nowhere other than Jerusalem – is part of the work. I’m sure it made no sense to anyone listening to him, but it wasn’t the first time he’d said such things.
I’m intrigued by this repetition of “today, tomorrow and the third day,” “today, tomorrow and the next day.” It focuses our attention on time. For Christians the phrase “third day” always carries echoes of Easter Sunday. But here it may rather refer to living in the rhythm of God’s mission, which always has a future-bound momentum.
We are to be about the work of God today, the day in which we live, in which we trust for daily bread. We are to plan for tomorrow – we’re not just adrift in time. And the day after tomorrow – which we cannot really predict with any accuracy – we finish the work God has given us to do. But by that time, it’s today. The sense I get is of living in a wave which starts, builds and then dissipates, by which time the next one is already building.
This phrase suggests to me a constantly forward-rolling movement of present ministry, future planning and then release into God’s hands. Every ministry we undertake, small or large, must get “finished” and a new one entered, one which is already underway, because it comes from God and is completed in God.
This way of seeing our engagement in God's mission makes us less generators of work than surfers of God’s movement – and surfers know how to relax and ride the wave. The day after tomorrow maybe we'll see what God was doing through us today. Gnarly.
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