Counting the Cost
(Proper
18C)
Homily
Delivered 4 September 2016
8:00
a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish
Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The
Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
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
often prosper. Thus the faith of
Deuteronomy 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 are Christians. Most of us 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. And it is hard to
believe in Biblical Inerrancy if you actually read the Bible and don’t just quote selected parts of 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 shows us a fierce, scary
Jesus. “Whoever comes to me and does not
hate [his closest family members and] 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 Jesus’
message here. But these tend to miss the starkness of language and emotional
freight of the saying.
The world where Jesus lived had plenty
of ideas about whom to love and whom to hate. Deuteronomy teaches, “You shall
love the Lord your God will all your might, mind, and strength.” The Psalms and Proverbs include statements
like “I hate all those who cling to worthless idols, the unjust, and the
evildoer” and see these as a model. Leviticus:
“Love your neighbor.” The Dead Seas
Scrolls teach, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”
So what is Jesus up to 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 here 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 potters begin to throw pots on the
wheel, they must first knead or wedge the clay to get it to the proper
consistency and uniformity. Then they 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.
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.
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.
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.
Jesus tells parables in order to shock
his listeners into a new understanding, a new relationship. The parables, with
their unlikely comparisons, twist endings, and 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! Sweet Jesus save us
from Fierce Jesus!
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 to
follow fiercely, with utmost devotion, what God is calling us to.
In
the name of Christ, Amen.
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