The Great Chasm (Proper 21C)

The Great Chasm
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21 Year C RCL)
29 September 2013--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings:

Amos 6:1a, 4-7; Psalm 146; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In Shakespeare’s play, Henry IV Part 2, Prince Hal becomes King Henry V.  His former companions, those who had corrupted his youth and led him into ignoble ways, see this as an opportunity to finally aggrandize themselves in a big way.  Sir John Falstaff, Ancient [Ensign] Pistol, Bardolph—they all want a piece of the action around the new king.   But Hal has changed.  The civil war, his coming to terms with his father, and the rigors of becoming the soldier leader that would win at Agincourt—all this has produced a new Henry.  The whole set-up has changed.   Henry’s former companions fail to see the new deal.  They still see an impressionable, malleable Hal, easily led astray, not the Henry who was to win the battle of Agincourt.  Falstaff makes a bet that he can worm his way into the new King’s graces.  But when he first encounters him, Henry is clear:

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;

But being awaked, I do despise my dream. …

Presume not that I am the thing I was,

For God doth know—so shall the world perceive—

That I have turned away my former self.

So will I those that kept me company. 

When thou dost hear I am as I have been,

Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,

The tutor and the feeder of my riots.

Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,

As I have done the rest of my misleaders,

Not to come near our person by ten mile.

John Tufts as Henry V at Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2012

 

Even after this certain word from the King himself, Falstaff tells his companions that young Hal is only making a show of honor for the sake of the court, and that he will secretly send for Falstaff to renew their friendship and revelry.   He persists, despite what is in front of his eyes, in trying to pursue his old relationship.  In the end, we hear of Falstaff’s death of some disease he has contracted in his debaucheries.  In Henry V, Henry ends any suspicions we may have that remnants of the old Hal persist by hanging some of his former drinking buddies when they loot French towns in violation of his orders. 

“There are none so blind as those who will not see” goes the old saying.   The point is that willfully ignoring the evidence before your eyes is the most profound sort of blindness. 

Today’s Gospel story is about such a willful blindness.  The tradition behind Luke’s Gospel places it on the lips of Jesus, but the truth be told, it could have been said by many of Jesus’ contemporaries.  A wildly rich and ostentatious man is contrasted with a dirt-poor wretch.  The wretch has the somewhat ironic name, Lazarus, a form of Eliezer, “My God is my help.”  The rich man is unnamed, but in some manuscripts is called Nineveh, or its shortened form Nives, presumably because that would be like calling someone “New York” or “Paris” today.  The word for “rich man” in Latin manuscripts is often taken as the man’s name, Dives (di-ves).

A couple of details are important in understanding the story:  the rich man dresses in purple and fine linen and feasts sumptuously every day.   This means he was wildly rich, and overly ostentatious about it.  Purple dye obtained from the Murex whelk was originally reserved for royalty. Throughout the Roman period, its cost was very high—it was literally worth its weight in silver.   Thus wearing purple was equivalent to our wearing a Saville Row suit costing in the range of $8-10,000, or, for a woman, a designer gown of $20-30,000.   The word translated by fine linen is probably not a flax-based fabric, but a highly densely woven soft Egyptian cotton or, more likely, silk.  Again, the point is its extreme cost.  Dives is a man who would appreciate Dorothy Parker’s advice:  “Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.” 

The story contrasts this extravagance with the worst sort of poverty right on the rich man’s doorstep:  Lazarus is covered with sores from malnutrition.  He wants to go through the rich man’s garbage for some food, but is too weak:  the dogs get it first, and then proceed to quench their thirst by licking his open sores. 

In all of this Lazarus remains apparently invisible to the rich man in the silk underwear and tailored suit, who can’t be bothered to do even a little to alleviate the suffering on his doorstep. 

But then, the sudden turn-around—they both die and go to their reward.  Lazarus, like the ever-faithful servant Eliezer whose name he bears, ends up with his kind master Abraham; the rich man, cruel master that he is, ends up in Hades, the Greek hell, where he is tormented. 

It is now that we discover that the Rich Man was seeing Lazarus in poverty each day after all.  He sees him from far off in Abraham’s bosom and recognizes him as the familiar wretch who once graced his doorstep.  And, like Falstaff with Henry V, he thinks that relationships haven’t changed.  He still thinks Lazarus is one of his hangers-on, like a servant, however ill he neglected and abused him.  “Father Abraham, send Lazarus on an errand for me, please.  Have him fetch me a drink.” 

“No way,” replies Abraham.  This guy has already suffered hell, now it’s your turn. Besides that, there is a great chasm between you and him.   It’s impossible to cross it.  You’re out of luck.” 

Again, like Falstaff, the rich man persists.  “Well then, if he can’t come here to help me, then send him on an errand to my brothers to warn them.”  He still thinks Lazarus is a step-and-fetch-it, a poor man on his door to be ordered about.   The profound nature of the reversal of fortunes has not sunk in, even though he is now naked amid the flames instead of comfortable in silk pajamas and 1,500 count Egyptian cotton. 

Now if this story were about the architecture of the afterlife, and the fact that there is a heaven and a hell and no possibility of moving from one to the other, Abraham’s reply would have been “that’s not allowed either!”  But instead, he replies, “if only it were that simple!  I could send him, but they wouldn’t believe his warning.  They are as willingly blind as you were in life, and still are!  Look at how they ignore the obvious teaching of the Torah to care for the poor.  Look at how they refuse to really see what is in front of their eyes, just as you did!” 

The chasm between the rich man and Lazarus in death is the same chasm that separated them in life—the rich man’s refusal to see what is in front of his eyes.  He is not compassionate, and unable to feel empathy.  He willingly turns a blind eye to the suffering on his doorstep.  But he in fact does see it.  The contrast between it and his own good fortune gives him pleasure, is part of the delights of extravagance.  After all, he recognizes Lazarus in the afterlife, and treats him as a familiar.  

Some would make this story into a proof-text for the doctrine of an everlasting hell for evil-doers and its unchangeable nature.  I think, however, it is about how hard it is for some of us to change.   As I have said before from this pulpit, my faith in God’s love and benevolence, my trust in the Cross, leads me to hope that in the end, God’s love will triumph, and all people will be made right with God and themselves.   But that doesn’t mean that it will be an easy victory.   What is impossible for us, is possible for God, and maybe even Falstaff or Dives might one day change. 

What is key here is that we stop deceiving ourselves about where we fall short, where we do not show compassion and love.  Simply asking God, or Father Abraham, to fix things for us without us changing how we see things and changing how we behave just delays love’s victory.  Asking God to forgive our sins without having a firm resolve to amend our lives is like asking God to change us without changing us.  It is like Falstaff betting that Hal will come back to him; like Dives wanting to send Lazarus on an errand. 

Sisters and brothers, we often run into compassion fatigue.  We get tired of helping people, or of encountering one more needy request made by what might be a deficient person.  We burn out in our service projects and callings.  God can recharge us.  God will recharge us.  God does recharge us. 

This week, I want us to each consider how we are being blind, whether to human suffering before us, or our own failings.   Starting from the proverb, “there is none so blind as those who will not see,” let us plumb where we suffer gaps in our vision, and then pray that God give us true vision anew.  

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Amen. 

Letting Go (Mid-week Message)

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Letting Go 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

September 25, 2013

 

“Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?”
― Susan Gordon Lydon,

The Knitting Sutra: Craft as a Spiritual Practice

We often think that spirituality is about holding on—not giving up in times of trial, of sticking in there through thick and thin, of not changing in the midst of changes about us. 

But I think that a healthy spirituality is probably more about letting go than it is about holding on.  True faith is what is left when we have let go of everything else, whether false hopes, sorry attachments, petty delusions, or inordinate loves.  Abundance is all about letting go:  only that which is empty is able to receive.

I am not saying we need to detach from all desiring or yearning, or give up all striving, just that we need to let our yearning and striving be open-ended, without expectation.   “Enough is enough” can be a declaration of satisfaction rather than a cry of desperation.  “This is as good as it gets” need not be an expression of disappointment. 

Jesus’ parables and beatitudes are all about finding enough in God, all about trust and acceptance, all about letting go, and letting God: the treasure hidden in the field, the loving father welcoming the wayward home, the seed growing on its own and the leaven mysteriously raising the loaf.  There is significance to this pattern. 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+  

A Shrewd Bet (Proper 20C)

A Shrewd Bet
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20 Year C RCL)
22 September 2013--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I worked for the Federal Government, I on occasion would hear certain phrases from my “higher-ups”:  “Just make it so, I don’t care how.”  “You take care of it, I don’t personally want to get too far down in the weeds on this.” “Just do it. I really don’t want to know the details.”

These phrases are the dark side of delegation of work and authority.  The underling is expected to meet certain goals by whatever means necessary, however messy, and at the same time maintain an appearance of tidiness, order, and calm.  An unstated assumption was this:  “I may be asked about it by the Press or members of Congress, and I want to be able to say honestly I don’t know.”  Such phrases are not limited to Federal or governmental service.  They occur in the private sector as well, where the unstated assumption is “this is all about profit and loss, the bottom line.” 

Today’s Gospel is a parable about such a supervisor and underling.   It is often called “the Parable of the Dishonest Manager.”  I think it should be called, “the Crooked Accountant,” or, “Street Smarts.”   It’s a problem for many, since Jesus here seems to praise a person he calls “dishonest” (v. 8), and sets him up as a model for us.

It almost certainly comes from the historical Jesus—no church leader in his right mind would have made this up and put it on Jesus’ lips.   Preachers have been trying to explain it away ever since.  Even in today’s Gospel, just after the parable itself, Luke tacks on three somewhat contradictory separate sayings (vv. 9-12) in an effort to make sense of the parable.   C.H. Dodd famously said that these appear to be notes for three separate sermons to preach the parable.  

For the original audience, the parable of the Crooked Accountant was probably less shocking than the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son’s Loving Father.  Both of these stories went against social norms and expectations: Samaritans were not expected to be “good,” and fathers were expected to be stricter disciplinarians of wayward children. 

But the scene in “the Crooked Accountant” would have been familiar to Jesus’ listeners.

The economic system of the day clashed with stated Jewish religious values. Torah said, do not oppress the poor, do not charge interest, do not practice usury.  Torah said, let land remain in families, and if they lose it by mismanagement or misfortune return it to them at least once a generation, in the Jubilee Year. 

But the dictates of the agricultural economy in Palestine under the Romans meant that the vast majority of small landowners were dispossessed without hope of restoration.  Many became tenant farmers: they had to pay for the right to remain on the land by signing notes promising at the harvest payment of hefty amounts of the anticipated produce.  Farmers failing to pay the absentee landlords were dispossessed entirely, falling into the anonymous and miserable mass of day laborers, whose hard manual work did not pay enough to feed a single person, let alone a family.  The large estates grew as more and more small farms defaulted on loans and were sold.

The rich landowner in the story has a manager who runs his operations.  It’s his job to ensure that the landowner gets richer.  He puts a hefty interest charge on the principal of the loan and imbeds it in the sum to be paid.   He works on a kind of commission and must pad the bills and rates he charges to include a “service fee” for himself.   The rates are extortionate, and designed to drive the farmers off their land.  The rich man doesn’t want to know the details—that would implicate him in breaking Torah—he just wants to see a positive balance in the books at the end of the year.  “Just get me the right bottom line—I don’t want to know the details.”   Like most hatchet men, the manager is the one who attracts the wrath of the those who suffer from his boss’s policy of exploitation and abuse; the landowner is left free and unstained above the fray, honored by all, including those he privately has been setting the manager on.  The farmers blame the manager and not the landowner for the gouging, little aware the underlying dynamics.

Then, as now, the weak had few weapons to defend themselves against the powerful: things like passive non-compliance, subtle sabotage, evasion, and deception.    It is probably some disgruntled debtors, angry at the manager’s pitiless business practices, who float the rumors of corruption against him.  The report come to the landowner—“He’s taking advantage of you.  He takes in way more than you are receiving.  He’s crooked.”     

The landowner could have the manager tried and punished as a thief. But that might make his own role in the extortion public.  Better not let the sordid details be known.   He wants to be seen as an upright member of the community, generous, a respecter of Torah, not as its violator, the greedy and heartless man he actually is.  So he decides to quietly sack the manager.  He asks for a final accounting so he can pass on this dirty job to some other hatchet man who can be more discreet in lining his own and as well as his master’s pockets.

The manager is clever.    He admits to himself clearly his own abilities and limitations.  He does not want to fall immediately into the hopeless mass of day laborers: “I am too weak to dig, and I am too proud to beg.”  So he himself uses a weapon of the weak to defend himself. 

He curries favor with the very tenant farmers he has been gouging.  They now might provide him with future needed hospitality and care.  So he rewrites the promissory notes, and gives the debtors all huge reductions.   He removes his own service charge, to be sure.  But given the huge sums involved in the write-offs, he also digs well into the unjust interest charges the landowner has been considering his rightful due, as long as he personally did not have to know about the sordid details.

The manager is betting that the landowner will not react by pressing charges against him for further theft.   He shrewdly assesses his boss’s basic character:  the landowner values respectability above the actual wealth he has used to buy it. That is why he originally said, “Make the bottom line but I don’t want to hear the details” and has already chosen to silently fire the manager quietly instead of risking a public revelation of all the sordid details of how the landowner man made his wealth.

The strategy is successful, so much so that when the landowner finds out how the accountant has pulled a golden parachute for himself out of his hat while in free-fall by essentially writing checks on the landowner’s account, he can only shake his head in admiration and say, I wish we could all be that shrewd! 

Jesus was no prude, and was not a man bothered religious scruples.  He was a craftsman from a backward and religiously suspect part of Palestine (Galilee) who lived closely with dispossessed peasants and day laborers.  He addressed his ministry primarily to them.  This parable reads like an inside joke for such people—the great and the mighty are so rich that they can afford on occasion to let scruples make them forgo the income provided by the rapacious squeeze their underlings apply to the poor.   A sum that spells the difference between eating and starving, living or dying, for the poor is for the rich a mere rounding error.

The story suggests that the difference between honest and dishonest is no simple matter:   in a corrupt system where the wicked prosper by oppressing the poor, the honorable may actually be dishonorable.  The dishonest steward has to honestly assess himself and the nature of how he has gouged people before he can find a way out of his dilemma.  He becomes honest only when he realizes the lie at the heart of how he has earned his livelihood and the wealth of his master. When he is willing to cut the rates and stop gouging, even though this may be crooked by the standards of the system, he is actually recognizing the true way of the Reign of God.   And when the Reign of God breaks in, grace happens.  If only we could all be that shrewd! 

Luke clearly believes the parable is about how we use wealth, and how we need to be smart in using our current resources to insure a better future in God’s kingdom.  But I am not so sure that this is the point the Historical Jesus had in mind. 

Jesus elsewhere says “Even bad parents know to give their children good things: bread and not a stone, an egg, and not a snake.  God is a lot better than that, so just imagine what he has in store for us!”    “If a guy who wants to stay in bed at midnight will get up and help a noisy friend at the door simply to get some peace and quiet, God will surely give you us things when we make some noise in prayer!”   Jesus likes using edgy images to get at truths about God.

Just before this story in Luke, Jesus gives several parables about God:  a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep out in the wilderness to seek out one who has gotten itself lost, a crazy woman who throws a big expensive party in joy when she finds some lost petty change, a somewhat ineffectual father of a dysfunctional family who won’t adequately discipline a wayward son, shamelessly runs out to meet him when he returns from his debauches, throws a big party for him, and then has to deal with the sullen wrath of the older son who feels slighted in the whole affair.  All of these stories stress the fact that God’s love is crazy love.   Jesus is saying God is wild about you!  God loves you without shame or reason.  Loving you is in the nature of God.  

The parable of Crooked Accountant tells us to be smart and lay our bets on God’s crazy love, because that’s God’s nature.  If a crook can be smart and play his cards right because he understands his own failings and his boss’s quirks, maybe we need to fess up and be honest about ourselves, and really let ourselves wake up to the truth of God’s love.   Be street smart like that crooked accountant!  God is crazy about you.  Put your bets on that.   

There are many ways we don’t place our bets on God’s love.  We feel guilt and shame even though we have been assured of forgiveness.  We doubt that maybe God’s love will one day overcome everything and win, and that all will come into its embrace.  We are slow to forgive others, and to show them love.

Trusting God’s love is a liberating thing.  It is what lies behind Martin Luther’s famous line, “Sin boldly!”   He is not telling us to sin, but to lose our silly scruples, and our fear of offending God.

Jesus is not telling us here to be dishonest.  He wants us to be truly honest, and to let the disreputable and unrespectable side of the Reign of God win us over, work in us. 

Truly betting on the reality of God’s love means we do not need to have fear.  It means we do not need to have regrets. It means we can love, and give, and sacrifice, and enjoy life and friends and family without shame. 

Thanks be to God. 

Amen. 

Ember Days (Midweek Message)

Ember Days

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 17, 2013

Today is what is called an Ember Day in the Church Calendar.  These happen four times a year, one in each season, and were originally agriculture-based fasts where prayers for planting, growth, harvest, and winter fallowing and early plantings were offered.  On the Church Calendar, they are on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday immediately after the first Sunday of Lent, the Day of Pentecost, Holy Cross Day (Sept. 14), and December 13.  In modern times, they serve primarily as occasions for reflection, reporting, and prayer for those who work in “the Lord’s vineyard” and “harvest field.”   The word “Ember” probably comes from the days’ name in Latin, Quatuor Tempora (“Four Times.”)   Candidates preparing for Holy Orders write their Bishops on Ember Days reports of their progress. 

We all in baptism are called as ministers of the Gospel, regardless of our status as clergy or lay.  Ember Days give us an occasion to reflect on our ministries. 

How are you doing in fulfilling the charge you received in baptism?  The baptismal covenant in the Prayer Book tells us what the calling of all Christians is: be faithful to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers; whenever you fall into sin repent and return to the Lord; proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Jesus Christ; seek and serve Christ in all persons; work for justice and peace and treat every person with dignity.

Discernment is the process by which we come to understand what our own particular vocation is, what it is that God is calling us specifically to.  Presbyterian theologian Frederick Beuchner defined vocation as where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.  Finding out where we are energized, “in the flow,” and in sober deep pleasure, and matching this to the needs and hunger of those about us is the principal task of discernment.  Attentiveness is key, paying close attention to where our joy lies.  

Your efforts in the ministry you are called to individually—are they sufficient?  Do they have enough focus?  Could they be broader, wider, or deeper?    How might you better equip yourself for more effective ministry? 

I encourage all of us this week of Ember Days to reflect on our ministry and find ways to better fulfill our vocation. 

Grace and Peace,    Fr. Tony+

God in Darkness (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 11, 2013

God in the Darkness

“Then Solomon said, 

‘The Lord has said that he

would dwell in thick darkness.’” (1 Kings 8:12-13)

“Truly you are a God who hides himself.” (Isaiah 45:15)

Today is the twelfth anniversary of terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York City.  A friend of mine sent me a message today, saying, simply, “It’s a dark day, hard for me to get through.”  He was living in New York 12 years ago, and lives there again now, and lost friends in the attack. 

I have told elsewhere the story of what happened to me on that day (http://www.ellipticalglory.blogspot.com/2011/09/font-face-font-family-times-new-romanp.html).  I know that many of our parishioners have sad stories to tell of that day, or of other horrors they have experienced.  I don’t want to talk about the details of these stories here, but rather about what the darkness we sometimes see in life has to do with our faith. 

Some people say that the problem of evil—the darkness, atrocity, and horror in life—is the reason they cannot believe in the existence of God.   I think, however, that the very fact that evil horrifies us is a sign that there’s something or someone more out there than just what we see before us.   Though it may make us doubt at times the proposition “there is a God,” it actually triggers in us yearning and desire, the basis of giving our heart to, of “believing” in God.   God must always be experienced as a “Thou,” not as an “it.” 

In her profound book Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil tells the story of two prisoners in solitary confinement whose cells are next to each other.  A stone wall separates them and they never have seen the other.  But over years, they discover each other’s existence and learn to communicate using taps and scratches.   The very wall that separates them is their sole means of communicating. “It is the same with us and God,” she says. “Every separation is a link.”

Nietszche, that pure example of heroic modernism, of godless honesty and will to power and giving sense to what is meaningless, says that if you stare into the Abyss long enough, the Abyss stares back.  Poet Christian Wiman takes this image further and turns it inside out.  For him, the “Bright Abyss” is God, whom we desperately desire because he is absent, and yet is constantly with us in our desiring. 

Dark things and dark days are not justified or justifiable.  But they can be redeemed. The Beatitudes of Jesus all find blessedness in some kind of horror: hunger, poverty, broken hearts.  The Absent God is present in his apparent distance.   Far off, yet near, but to the Presence bent, we are pilgrims walking in a desert land.   Our pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, our God who “has chosen to dwell in darkness,” and “who hides himself” is always speaking to our heart, if only in our inchoate yearning for something better that what is before our eyes.     

Letting ourselves be drawn to that mysterious yet fascinating Other is the beginning of trust and faith. 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

Counting the Cost (Proper 18C)

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Counting the Cost

(Proper 18C)

Homily Delivered 8 September 2013

8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Today’s scriptures aren’t easy.  The first reading says if you follow God’s commands, he’ll bless you and your life will be wonderful.  If you don’t, he’ll curse you and your life will be miserable.   Most of us, I think, know from our lives that bad things often happen to good people, and the wicked prosper.  This Deuteronomistic faith thus seems more like a wish than a description of reality.  In the Epistle, Paul sends back a run-away slave, Onesimus (“Mr. Useful”) to his owner, Philemon.  Both of them are Christians.  Most of us today probably wish that Paul had told Philemon “Slavery is bad; set Onesimus free.”  But no—all he can manage is “Take him back, be gentle, he’s a good kid.”  And the Gospel—well, it is one of the hardest of the hard sayings of Jesus:  “Hate your families and your lives.” 

On days like today I am glad we Episcopalians read so much of the Bible in our liturgy.  If you come to Morning Prayer and Sunday Eucharist, in the course of year you will have read almost the whole bible.  And it is hard to believe in Biblical Inerrancy if you actually read the Bible and don’t just quote it.  Your faith in Biblical Truth becomes nuanced, and you realize that sometimes the authors are arguing with each other.  You see that the unity and harmony of Holy Scripture lies deep beneath the surface, and not in the shallows of doctrines or morals.  Holding the Bible to be God’s word means being true to what that diverse dialogue revealed, and in continuing the dialogue even today.

Luke here does not show us a loving, kind Jesus.  He shows us a fierce Jesus, a scary Jesus.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, is incapable of being my disciple!” 

Can this be the same Jesus who said, “Love your enemies?”   Or “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself?”

There are ways of softening what Jesus says here, and pretending he was not really being fierce.  But such rationalizations tend to miss the starkness of the language and its emotional freight.

In the world where Jesus lived, there were plenty of ideas about whom to love and whom to hate. “You shall love the Lord your God will all your might, mind, and strength” (Deuteronomy).  The Psalms and Proverbs include many statements like “I hate all those who cling to worthless idols, the unjust, and the evildoer” and see these as a model.  “Love your neighbor” (Leviticus).   The Dead Seas Scrolls’ Community Rule teaches, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”   

What is Jesus saying when he turns this on its head and says, “love your enemies” and, “hate your friends and family?” 

Context is key. Note how the story starts: “Now huge crowds had started following Jesus around.”  The problem here is an overabundance of popularity and unwelcomed celebrity.   People flocked to Jesus in curiosity, to see whether he might satisfy their hopes. Jesus’s hard saying is to these groupies. 

Luke adds, by way of commentary, two parables of Jesus that probably had circulated separately: the tower builder and the king going to war.

A similar parable did not make it into the canon: Gospel of Thomas Logion 98 is one of the few I believe may go back to the historical Jesus,  It is the even fiercer parable of the assassin:  “The kingdom … is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man." 

All three parables are about focus and commitment, and the need to be realistic about what a task may require.   Two are violent: a king going to war and an assassin preparing to murder a prominent person.   I am a pacifist, and reject wholeheartedly the myth of redemptive violence.  I wish Jesus had not chosen such violent images.  But Jesus’s fierce images, war, assassination, hatred of family and life, are about a fierce subject—commitment. 

Human endeavors, whatever they are, demand commitment.  Sometimes this means that a certain amount of force is required.   

When a potter begins to throw a pot on the wheel, she must first knead or wedge the clay to get it to the proper consistency and uniformity.  Then she must attach it to the wheel.  If it is not first properly affixed and centered, it will go unstable and spin off the wheel, unraveling into a chaotic mess.  To properly affix the clay you must slam it hard, with force, onto the wheel.  Anything less than that risks a failed pot.

When you get nibbles on your fishing line, you must firmly, with force, pull the line to set the hook.  Too violent, and you pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth, not firmly enough, it will get loose.  Either way, you lose the fish. 

When you grill or roast meat, you have to get your grill to a high temperature and sear the meat quickly on both sides, and then reduce the heat to cook to the desired point of doneness.   If you keep the high temperature throughout, the meat burns.  But if you do not aggressively sear at the outset, the moderate temperature of the cooking process will dry out and toughen the meat, making it unpalatable, if not inedible, regardless of the quality of the cut.  Proper roasting requires a controlled, but forceful use of excess heat at the outset to ensure success. 

Surfing requires you to really put an all-out effort at paddling when the wave begins to swell beneath you.  You have to give it your all or your board will be too slow, and the wave will pass it by.  To catch a wave, you have to have all-out commitment.  It is like this on a rugby pitch or football field:  you have to give it up, go all-out, leave everything on the field if you are to have any hope of winning, and that from the start. 

This need for commitment and even force in human effort can lead to abuse.  Basic training in military service—boot camp—seeks through aggressively applied physical and mental stress to break down the individual quirks and objections of individuals, and form them into effective members of a military command structure.   Ritual initiations, say to fraternities or sororities, similarly seek to build community through shared suffering.   Hazing is the ugly avatar of this apparent human need to use aggressive force to build community and strengthen commitment.

These parables and sayings should not be taken literally.  Jesus here is not telling us to go to war to be his disciples, to become assassins.  He is not telling us literally to hate our loved ones and despise life. 

He is saying that the cost of discipleship is high, far higher than any of the crowds following Jesus out of curiosity seem to have realized.  At the very minimum, it demands attentive openness to the teacher, rather than keeping a little running score on if the teacher measures up to our expectations. 

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, grace is free, but it is not cheap.  It demands an all-out commitment. Faith is an all-life matter, not an expression of consumer desire. Faith cannot run on auto-pilot.  If you follow Jesus merely to go along with mass crowds driven by curiosity, partisanship, and herd instinct, it is doomed to fail.

When I was in graduate school, I often regretted that I did not have more time.  Father of a young family, working nights to pay the bills, I sometimes was hard-pressed to find time to prepare for class.  One day, I made the mistake of trying to explain my lack of preparation for an advanced Aramaic course taught by Fr. Joseph Fitzmyer, a Jesuit priest and one of the world’s finest Aramaists.   I said that had not had the time that week to finish class preparation.   To this Fr. Fitzmyer innocently replied, with knowing eyes, “You know, Tony, you have all the time there is.  Literally—there is no more time than the time you already have.  It’s not that you have no time, but that choose to use your time differently.   I realized that he was right, as hard as this view seemed to be when I first heard it.   It’s all about priorities.   

Jesus tells parables in order to shock his listeners into a new understanding, a new relationship. The parables, with their unlikely points of comparison, their twist endings, their overturning of expectations, are a little like Zen Koans.  They seek to shock the hearer into a new reality.  

One Zen master famously said, “If you meet the Buddha walking down the street, kill him!”  Not a particularly gentle image.  The gut wrenching saying forces us to understand that any Buddha we contain in our understanding or mind is not really the Buddha.  So it is with “If you want to follow me, hate those you love.”  It’s precisely because families and our love for them matter so much for us that this saying shocks us to realize how important commitment to the Reign of God is. 

Jesus’ hard sayings all share this Koan-like character: highly charged language and images, without any effort at softening them or prettifying them, force us to shift gears:  “I bring a sword, not peace!  I divide families and loved ones, not unite them!  Cut off your limbs and put out your eyes if they cause you to sin!  Leave your families without even saying goodbye and let the dead bury themselves! Hate your families!”

Lord, have mercy! Merciful Jesus save us from Fierce Jesus!

Often with the choir before worship, I say the Royal School for Church Music’s Chorister’s Prayer: 

Bless, O Lord, us Thy servants,
who minister in Thy temple.
Grant that what we sing with our lips,
we may believe in our hearts,
and what we believe in our hearts,
we may show forth in our lives.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This week, let us look at how we spend our time, our emotional energy, our money, and ask ourselves, what am I committed to?  Is it service and kindness?  Is it alleviating suffering and reconciling alienation?  Am I committed to Jesus and God’s Reign?  Where do my true desires lie?  What makes my heart sing?  Do my actions reflect these desires? 

And then let us pray for the grace that what God is calling us to,  we believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth fiercely in our lives. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.