Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

For some people, sadly, it is not too hard to hate father and mother. There are people who should never have children. It amazes me how much abused people can forgive their parents. And that is good, because forgiveness is more necessary to the spiritual health of the forgiver, than of the transgressor. But these bad mothers and gathers are not the ones Jesus says his disciples must hate. It is any fathers and mothers, whoever they are. This is intolerable, and I believe it was meant to be. I think Jesus meant to be provocative and to discourage those “large crowds” that were following Him around. After God, a Jew’s first duty was to father and mother. Jesus was telling them that His disciples would have to break the Fifth Commandment. “If you want to be my disciple, you are going to have to forsake every human relationship, renounce all your possessions and even your own life.” Intolerable. What are we to make of it?

Well, there are a couple of ways to take the bite out of the scandal, but let us hesitate at least for a moment, to do so. At the least, let us notice that Jesus required a radical commitment of His disciples ~ a commitment that will cost them something, in the end a commitment that will cost them everything. What does that have to do with us? It seems to be saying that you can’t be a Christian unless you are a martyr ~ or at least a monk! There is no room for familial ties or commitments among the disciples of Jesus. But the Church long ago abandoned that idea (if it ever really held it to begin with). There has always been room in the Church for non-possessors like St. Francis, but as soon as they say that everyone must do the same in order to be faithful Christians (as some of St. Francis’s followers said) they are rightly regarded as fanatics and false teachers. Puritans and absolutists will sympathize with them and perhaps even look with contempt upon the laxity of the institutional Church. But let us consider the Lord’s pronouncement in the context of the whole New Testament.

We know that Paul didn’t condemn marriage and householding. He may have though that it didn’t make much sense, given his expectation of the Second Coming within a year or two, but he didn’t order everybody to sell everything and give it to the poor and just wait. He we know that Paul wrote a generation before this particular Gospel. By then, the Church was persecuted, and the Cross was seen as a real possibility, if not a universal calling, for all Christians. I think that it is very unlikely, however, that Jesus Himself ever actually used the Cross as a metaphor for discipleship, as we do now. The idea of “taking up your cross and following Jesus” would make sense only after the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

By the time Luke was writing, the Jesus movement had also divided plenty of Jewish families ~ brother against brother, father against son, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, and so on. Quite a number of people could not be Jesus’ disciples unless they broke with their families in a very real way. But was this passage meant for every single person everywhere and throughout history? After all, Jesus did not call everybody to follow Him as a disciple. Even some who were quite ready to renounce everything and do so He sent home. We are so used to identifying with the disciples in the Gospel stories that we think discipleship is synonymous with being a faithful Christian. But what about those grateful people whom Jesus turned back from following Him? I don’t think He was rejecting them or condemning them. Maybe the path of martyrdom and radical non-possession is not for everyone. Maybe it is possible to love Jesus and to acknowledge Him without being His disciple in the sense of following Him around.

Because following Him around was clearly what discipleship meant at the time. Jesus was on the move, and if you wanted to be His disciple ~ in the sense of a master/disciple relationship ~ you would have to be on the move, too. You would have to leave home. You would have to leave everyone and everything. So, in a sense, this passage is just recognizing the reality. But in another sense, it is polemical. Remember that it was written much later, at a time when the disciples of Jesus were very much at odds with the rest of the Jews. This passage, with its defiant requirement of breaking the Fifth Commandment, says that Jesus is greater than Moses, His disciples are therefore above the Law of Moses, and their suffering is the badge of their calling.

Like the other two readings today, this Gospel passage is occasional. That is, it is a message for a particular time, for particular people. As such, we have a certain liberty in drawing universal principles from it: the literal sense does not bind us, certainly not to the advice to hate our parents and our children, any more than we are bound to Paul’s gentle brow-beating of Philemon. The literal sense of that letter may be interesting, but it has no relevance at all for us, until we begin to interpret it spiritually. Philemon should treat Onesimus, his wayward slave, generously: not as a slave (whom he would have a legal right to crucify), but as a brother in Christ Crucified. Philemon ought to forgive Onesimus, and maybe even free him and send him back to Paul out of gratitude for all Paul had done for Philemon by bringing him the true liberation of the Gospel. Here is a principle we can apply universally: we must all behave as Paul wants Philemon to behave. We must all refuse to insist on our legal rights against those who have wronged us or are in our debt. For we, ourselves, have been forgiven and we ought to show our gratitude. In that sense, we ARE above the law: we do not insist on our rights under it.

Fine. But what is the principle in parent-hatred and dispossession? It has to be about radical commitment ~ the willingness to risk everything. Leaving home is a metaphor for the spiritual journey, the soul in search of God. That could be a universal principle: we have to forsake everything near and dear to us to be united with God. In a sense, that too is a truism; because complete union with God comes after death, when we really DO renounce everything, including life itself. To take up the Cross may mean to practice the detachment from possession now, in this life: to die before death, as the mystics say.

Forsaking Father and Mother, spouses and children, and all possessions could also be a way of saying that human social traditions ~ however sacred and life-giving ~ are provisional and temporary. The Reign of God, which is at hand, the Reign of universal peace and justice will not have much to do with our present social order. Nevertheless, this conventional social life is not utterly incompatible with Christ, despite His words today. After all, He did also attend the wedding in Cana, where He secretly provided wine for the rejoicing family, better than that served at first, which had run out. Divinity, unnoticed, permeated the very ordinary celebration of conventional relationships. But that secret Wine, inexhaustible, is only a foretaste of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. And if we are to leave our conventional relationships, it is not really to lose them, but to enter into a deeper personal union not only with God, but with all other persons, and with all creation. Perhaps in that, ultimate sense, disciples must “hate” the boundaries and restrictions of our little lives, which make them too small for the Great Love that is coming.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!