Shock Therapy
(Proper 18C)
Homily Delivered 8 September 2019
8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
(Oregon)
The Very 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.
Hold back, and you will most likely injure yourself.
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 stun the hearer into a new reality. They are Jesus’ shock therapy for souls lost
in self-delusion. The parables of the
unfunded builder, the king unprepared for war, and the assassin’s
training—these are his shock therapy for those who want to pick and choose
their religion, who dabble in spirituality, and who are unwilling to go the
distance with God.
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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