23rd Sunday in Ordinal Time – September 5, 2010

1^st Reading – Wisdom 9:13-18

Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the LORD intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans. For the corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns. And scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven, who can search them out? Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high? And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.


2^nd Reading – Philemon 1:9-17

I rather urge you out of love, being as I am, Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus.  I urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment, who was once useless to you but is now useful to [both] you and me. I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I should have liked to retain him for myself, so that he might serve me on your behalf in my imprisonment for the gospel, but I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary. Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord. So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me.
 

Gospel – Luke 14:25-33

Great crowds were traveling with him, and he turned and addressed them, "If any one comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion? Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work the onlookers should laugh at him and say, 'This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.' Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. In the same way, everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”

Homily

Our gospel passage for today is probably one of the most controversial passages of the bible. How can Jesus, on the one hand, give us a mandate to love one another as he has loved us, and on the other, tell us to hate father and mother, wife, brothers and sisters, and even one’s own life? People often are taken aback or even offended by Jesus’ apparently extreme demand for his disciples to “hate” our families. There are three interpretive issues that need to be understood to put this statement into proper perspective.

First, a common Middle Eastern type of rhetoric was to use the hyperbole -- that is, to overemphasize or exaggerate to make a point.

Second, one must realize that in ancient times, there was no higher precedence than one’s obligation to one’s family. People were very possessive toward family members, which had survival value in those days. They commonly married their first cousins and made their livelihoods within family enterprises. In contrast, the modern concept of “family values” looks very weak. One’s clan was always first. Without that blood tie survival was seriously in question, which is why the bible emphasized the need to take care of widows and orphans who were left with no resources. There was no Social Security or welfare system to fall back upon.

Third, the Greek word, misein, being literally translated as ‘hate,’ may be an idiom meaning ‘love less than’ or ‘not to prefer’. (See, for example, Matthew 10:37). The translation from the Greek text into English is rather unfortunate since what Jesus is actually saying is to love God MORE than these others, no matter how important they are in our lives. And what it implies is that we can’t let our relationships to any of the people we love be our excuse for a lukewarm faith. One source even suggests that to love family more than Christ is to take more pleasure in them. 

How sad it is that this passage was distorted over the centuries into the deliberate shunning of one’s family. In most cases, those who entered into religious life were required to leave their families behind altogether and renounce membership with them as they went off to a cloister somewhere. There were thousands, perhaps millions of them who might have known that a parent or sibling was dying and could not go to them; they could only attempt to remove themselves from the event and celebrate it as a triumph of their loved one’s soul coming toward its otherworldly reward. What a dour and austere understanding they had of what it meant to follow Christ! The practice seems hard to reconcile with Jesus’ instructions to give comfort to those in distress. We are to visit those who are imprisoned, care for the sick, clothe the naked and feed the hungry. But the intention was that the works of mercy should be performed with detachment that was thought to be impossible within a close family structure in order for compassion to flow from an entirely unselfish motive.

What we are forced to do as we consider today’s gospel is to assess the conditions under which we are willing to become true disciples. Shall we only follow to the extent that our partner or parents can agree with us? - for certainly, this takes us to the lowest common denominator. Shall we stay in a faith group with which our conscience is at odds on many counts because leaving will put us on the outs with most of the people we know? Are we so afraid of embarrassment that making a change would require moving away and starting a new life (something akin to a government witness protection program)? Will we lose business and suffer financially if we are seen as outside of the ‘in group’?

Jesus sets us straight on the conditions of discipleship. What he’s saying in this gospel passage is that we must be willing to rearrange our priorities and to abandon all other loyalties and even our family if necessary. He is telling us that the price of discipleship will cost us our pride, our ambition, our ego; it may even possibly result in lost relationships or even death. 

Sometimes we may feel very deeply for someone but we must weigh and consider the effects of meeting our own needs on those around us. We see that for the early Christians relationships with one another often became deeper than their blood relations; they regarded one another as brothers and sisters, fathers, mothers, or children. For example, in our second reading, the relationship between Paul and Onesimus was an intimate one and Paul obviously was torn between two people he referred to as beloved and as brothers in the Lord. Paul viewed Onesimus as his spiritual child and himself as having become his father. In the letters attributed to Paul, there are only two other places that he refers to specific individuals as his children: Titus (1:4) and Timothy (I Corinthians 4:14-17). On the one hand, Paul wanted to keep Onesimus with him, perhaps to share as missionaries or to provide him help while in prison, but he also cared for Philemon. He was writing to Philemon to try to work these issues out.

When we fully commit to Christ, we embark on a path where our priorities will have to be reordered. Relationships were as complex in the first century as they are today. There is only one principle that will allow us to do what is required of us as disciples: our first priority must be to love God and, as a result, all of our relationships will assume their rightful places. As the 1^st Reading tells us, we are too finite to grasp how God thinks. We tend to become weighed down with many concerns and misunderstandings about ourselves as well as others. Sometimes God uses us as his instrument to bring what is needed to another, even if it isn’t what that person wants. When God sent wisdom to Israel’s past generations they were saved from their own selves and could live correctly. He is the compass by which all our relationships are ordered. 

So, ‘taking up a cross and carrying it’ means investing all that we are, all that we stand for, and all of what we possess. In Jesus’ time, to carry a cross was a mark of great shame; the person seen carrying a cross had been judged worthy of death. But somehow some Christians think the term ‘bearing ones cross’ means that we are to embrace suffering as atonement. What it really means is to be a bold witness of Christ’s message, not as a way to atone for sin, but because it is a privilege given to those espoused to the Beloved. It is ‘true love’ standing in the light of Christ’s radiant love and living in the joy of the truth that sets us free and allows us to be free to serve others.  

When Jesus speaks of beginning to construct a tower without the resources to complete it, he is really talking about an underdeveloped love that needs to grow into loving completely with a towering love for God, a love that is great enough to reunite us creatures with our source.

O Beloved, help us to open our hearts to you, to grow in love, and to love wholly and completely. We come asking for wisdom and the fire of the Holy Spirit to enkindle our hearts with a perfect love that will transform us into the bold witnesses you are calling us to be. Amen.