Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, RCL
September 8, 2019
North Fork Ministries
Gospel:
Luke 14:25-33
Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, "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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, `This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
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I can imagine that after hearing this speech that Jesus gave to the large crowds traveling with him, his disciples turned to one another, shook their heads and said, “Jeezus, I wish he hadn’t said that.” It had been tough enough for them to find followers. There were plenty of other Messianic prophets preaching in the land of Judea, plenty of competition from other healers and miracle workers. And now Jesus has to make the cost of discipleship completely out of reach – telling the people that they have to hate their father and mother, their whole family, even life itself – just to be a disciple? And as if that weren’t bad enough – Jesus says that if you want to be one of his followers you have to give up all your possessions. Makes you wonder how Christianity ever caught on.
I could try to explain away the harshness of Jesus’ teachings to the large crowds, contextualize it, tell you that the specific language was meant to apply to just to a particular situation at a particular time and that later redactors of the gospel simply took it out of context. Or I could say that Jesus was really using hyperbole, as he often did, to make an important point about how difficult it would be to follow him.
That all might be true, but I’ve found that whenever I read a saying attributed to Jesus that make me grimace, when I hear words that I find really hard to accept, then those are likely to be the very passages that require my close attention.
These words would have been offensive to Jesus’ listeners as well. In fact, the passage, was toned down in the gospel of Matthew, more mildly expressed, saying nothing about hate, but only making the love of family secondary to the love of Jesus.
But for Luke, and in the gospel of Thomas, hatred of family is presented as a condition of discipleship. As severe as this saying seems to us, imagine how it was heard in first century Palestine, where an individual had no real identity apart from family ties. Family was everything and Jesus was striking at the very heart of existing social structure, and replacing that structure with a more fundamental relationship with God.
Maybe it would help to understand why the large crowd traveling with Jesus, upon hearing these harsh words, didn’t immediately turn on their heels and head the other direction, if we better understood who they were. Who were the people in the crowd? They were poor people. They were an oppressed people. They were a people living under the boot of their Roman occupiers and subject to a corrupt religious establishment, whose leaders owed their positions more to the favor of their Roman lords, than to the God of Israel. These people to whom Jesus’ voice resonated, were people who were looking for radical change in their lives and circumstances. Poverty and oppression had become too much for them, and the radical voice of the prophet Jesus spoke to them. And these people, in turn, touched Jesus’ heart.
They touched Jesus’ heart in the same way that immigrants brought across the Atlantic to work in the mines and mills of America, touched Jesus heart. Jesus’ voice resonated with those who arrived in America bound and shackled, destined for slavery. Jesus felt the desperation of Okies who climbed from the dustbowl onto boxcars, to work in the fields of California. Jesus’ harsh words had real meaning for the jobless who stood in breadlines in Chicago and New York during the Great Depression. Jesus’ heart ached for those who emerged, dazed and gaunt, from concentration camps in Poland and Germany. And Jesus’ presence is with our nation’s frightened and desperate Hispanic immigrants at this very moment.
Which brings us to the central question facing us 21st century Christians, living, perhaps contentedly, on the North Fork of Long Island. What do Jesus’ words have to say to us? How are we, as members of the contemporary church, as practitioners of the established religion, as citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, how are we to come to terms with the prospect of following a radical, countercultural 1st century prophet whose message was aimed at liberation, freedom, and lifting up the lowly?
What does Jesus have to say to us? Maybe nothing … unless we also seek change. At its heart, Jesus’ message was a call for transformation. If you are content with the status quo, if you are satisfied with your life and with the state of the world, then the notion of picking up a cross and following Jesus - giving up all that you have in order to be a disciple, is not likely to have much appeal.
But if you are seeking transformation, if you hunger to know God in a radical, life altering way, if there is an emptiness inside you that can’t be filled with all the possessions you can pile on, then maybe Jesus’ words, even at their most severe and strident, may hit home.
Maybe hate isn’t really too strong a word after all. I can think of things that I hated about my father – the bigotry typical of a southern man of his time, the often-ungrateful demands he placed on my mother, his heavy-handedness toward my poetic and sensitive and rebellious older brother. And hate probably isn’t too strong a word to describe the way I feel about my mother’s unwillingness to live into her potential, her fearfulness, and her insistence that family conflicts remain hidden and festering under the table.
Jesus calls on his would-be disciples to hate life itself. Maybe that’s not too big of a stretch either. Who among us hasn’t at some point, hated the very life you are living?
Jesus is offering new life, a life unfettered by the stifling negative influence of familial ties, of the oppressive nature of a life you no longer wish to live. Jesus offers an opportunity to live a life liberated from the tyranny of attachment to possessions. It is a way symbolized by the sacrifice of the cross, but it is through the sacrifice of material things that don’t really matter, of relationships that oppress, that true liberation can emerge.
You might think of Jesus’ invitation to take up your cross and follow him as a passionate summons to a life of detachment. It’s an invitation to freedom from the constraints of unhealthy relationships, and a refusal to submit to the temptation to be owned by one’s possessions. Jesus doesn’t put the invitation in milk toast terms; he lays down the gauntlet and issues a challenge to forsake all else and enter the Kingdom of God.
As we earlier heard the Psalmist proclaim, “we are marvelously made.” May we have the courage to live into the life God has in store for us