Sometimes I
want to laugh when a gospel like the one for today is read and people say,
“Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Sometimes
I want to cry. Surely there are few here
today who actually welcome a gospel like this.
Listen to it. “Whoever comes to
me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and
sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” I’d say that Jesus is hardly the champion of
family values uttering things like that.
And what do you make of this:
“whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my
disciple”? He is not exactly talking
about carrying the cross in liturgical processions. And the coup
de grâce: “So therefore, none of you
can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” And to all that we just said, “Praise to you,
Lord Christ”!
It has long
been held that the harder the saying (of Jesus), the more likely it is to be
authentic. The more embarrassing it is,
the more likely it is to be a trustworthy original. By that standard, the
gospel of today must be reliably believable as Jesus’ own words. But let’s be honest about it. That he actually said and meant it doesn’t
cut much ice with people who have already decided that Christianity is
basically about being conventionally good and loving people. And it certainly doesn’t impress someone who
is convinced, as many seem to be, that Jesus did and would support a raft of
things like supply-side economics, the notion of virtuous war, rationing health
care, militarism, cultural tribalism, and unlimited gun rights.
The truth
of the matter is that, like all the generations before us, we make Jesus in our
image, whether we are conservative or progressive, artistic or scientific,
philosophical or theatrical, contemplative or activist. And we pay little or no attention to what he
says when it does not agree with what we have already decided to be
correct. He famously asked once, “Why do
you call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say?” Well, why do we? Because down deep we believe that he really
cannot possibly mean such difficult things as hating father and mother, wife
and children, brothers and sisters, and even life itself in order to be his
disciple. We rationalize it all by
saying that it is an example of his Middle Eastern hyperbole, just as we
imagine that “giving up all your possessions” must mean something other than
what it says. I pause to note that
those who tout themselves as biblical literalists generally don’t dwell on such
passages as this. “Love your enemies,”
“do good to them that persecute you,” and “give up all your possessions” even
to the literalist must be metaphorical, because no Jesus that we could ever
follow would have said such things.
You want to
get radical? Follow Jesus. Believe what he says. Take it seriously. Start living this kind of gospel out. Begin defining yourself and your positions
not in accordance with who approves of you (family, friends, neighbors) but by
wrestling with what it means to embrace a willingness to let go of everything
and start redefining your whole life from scratch. That is what taking up your cross means. That is what becoming like a child so that
you may live in God’s domain sharing God’s life means. That is what, to quote the language of Deuteronomy,
it is to “choose life, not death.” That
is why, ushering in the ministry of Jesus, John the Baptizer said, “Even now
the axe is laid to the root of the trees, and every tree that does not bear
good fruit is cut down.” The gospel of
Jesus and the Christian life it leads to are not just optional elements that
can be plugged in to an already designed lifestyle. They mean a complete refiguring of the way we
think, the way we act, the way we desire, even the way we love.
It is
exactly at this point that I want to throw off my vestments, toss away my
credentials as a preacher of the gospel, and (I speak seriously) simply ask
what in the world am I to do. I may know
lots about the Bible and what it means, but I have little expertise in living
the life I have just described to you.
So if you are wondering how in blazes to go about such radical living,
be aware that I for one am in the same boat with you. There have been times through the years when
I have had flashes of what I thought it might mean, but there have been many
more times when I have succumbed to the same thing that I have said the ages
have specialized in, namely cutting Jesus and his message down to my size. Is there no other way?
Of one
thing I am convinced. Living a Christian
life does not necessitate defanging the hard sayings of Jesus to make it all a
comfortable, non-threatening proposition.
Yet of another thing am I reasonably sure. If the gospel is true, then it must accord
with the reality of our existence, else there would be no reason for Jesus to
demand of us things that are totally impossible. The gospel to be lived has to be
livable.
So how do
we do it? Start with the notion of
hating father or mother, etc. For some
people, those who have toxic parents, for example, that might come close to
working. But taken on the whole, Jesus’
teaching is not about hating. So what he
means here is for us to make a clean break with family as the mode of defining ourselves. Since family is the basic unit of
socialization in which we learn to adapt, what Jesus is proposing here is not
having a nasty attitude towards the group we happen to have been born into, but
that we grow into a life that is distinctly counter-cultural in major
ways. That is why Christian life depends
on the creation of a new family, a new people, a new community as
integral. The things that mark Christ as
different are the same things that mark his family and followers as
different: authenticity, independence,
giving, forgiving, healing, subordinating ego to self, serving, praying, fierce
honesty, courage, questioning, table fellowship with everyone without
discrimination, and above all orienting one’s entire life towards the God who
is known intimately as “Abba.” The children of Abba, led by Jesus, hang together,
supporting each other as they—we—struggle to keep from getting sucked in to the
competitive, striving, ego-driven, control-oriented, power-hungry,
status-seeking, self-indulgent currents of the culture—nearly any culture—that
surrounds us.
Without the
grace of God, by which I mean God’s very own self-supplied energy and power,
independent of our efforts or deserving, we cannot. And ironically, without our cooperation, God
will not.[1] Still, it is hard! I hear the voice of a spiritual director of
mine years ago. One of the most deeply
prayerful people I have ever known, she was driving through a snowstorm one
time on a dark Connecticut night, trying to reach the Berkshires in once piece. Partly to keep herself company, she was going
over in her mind a whole string of persons on her prayer list. She named people who were sick and dying,
people who had suffered indignities and abuse, persons who were fighting
addictions, those going through awful trials and divorces and losses. Overcome by the sheer size of the pile of
human tragedy, she gripped her steering wheel, and called out defiantly, “Why
God, Why? Why all this? Why do you demand it of us? It is too much, just too much.” In the silence that followed she said she
heard the words, not a literal voice but as clearly as if it had been, “I mean
it to be too much.” Shades of George
Herbert’s poem, “The Pulley:”
When God at first
made man,
Having a glass of
blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) pour
on him all we can:
Let the world’s riches,
which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.
So strength first
made a way;
Then beauty flow’d,
then wisdom, honor, pleasure:
When almost all was
out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone
of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom
lay.
For if I should (said
he)
Bestow this jewel
also on my creature,
He would adore my
gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature,
not the God of Nature:
So both should losers
be.
Yet let him keep the
rest,
But keep them with
repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and
weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him
not, yet weariness
May toss him to my
breast.[2]
Living the
life of a disciple is impossibly hard.
But the irony is that the very difficulty that wears us down and wears us out is the
difficulty that ultimately tosses us to the breast of the great mothering God
who bets the whole creation that in the end our weariness with all our
possessions of whatever kind will bring us home to the one who gave us birth and nurses
us.
But there
is something else that is embedded in this hard saying of Jesus, something not
to be missed. He invites us to calculate
the cost of discipleship. You wouldn’t
go to war without enumerating the risks (one would hope that those plotting
another war are listening to that somewhere today!). You wouldn’t start a building project, not if
you are prudent, without knowing how you were going to finance it. The grace of God is not only mediated through
the community of Abba’s children helping each other; it takes shape in the
lives of those children as they gradually become aware that this Jesus calling
his disciples to extraordinary transformative change is not some distant leader
floating around in the clouds but is indeed the Force that is within them. Yes!
That is why the cross he calls us to shoulder is none other than the
resurrection power that makes the cross bearably light. You know that to be true. Because you know that when you take even the
first courageous step towards following your truth, and then another and
another, you quickly realize that the path you are on is not impossibly hard to
travel. It is bliss, it is joy. Surprises appear, dazzling you. Doors open unexpectedly. Gifts crop up out of nowhere. And no one would ever guess that any of it is
true without taking that first step, cross in hand, following the Leader who
leads us through no darker nights than he has gone through before.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013
[1]
Often misattributed to St. Augustine of Hippo: “Without God, we cannot; without
us, God will not.” This might be a
paraphrase of a statement in Sermon 169, “He who created you without you will not
justify you without you.”
[2]
“The Pulley,” in George Herbert, The
Country Parson, The Temple, ed. John N. Wall, Jr., in The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 284.
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