23d Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sept. 8, 2013
Luke 14: 25-33
St. Vincent’s Hospital, Harrison, N.Y.
“If
anyone 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. Anyone who does not renounce all his
possessions cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14: 25, 33)
The Rich Man Led to Hell, by David Teniers |
That
sounds extreme, doesn’t it? We have to
remember that the way people spoke in Jesus’ time, and Semitic languages like
Arabic even today, rely a lot on exaggeration to emphasize a point. Even we—don’t a lot of parents say things
like, “I’ve told you a million times to clean up your room”?
But
Jesus does have a point to make, the point emphasized by the exaggerations of
“hating” one’s
parents and family, of “renouncing all” one’s possessions.
The
point is that following Christ in his allegiance to the kingdom of God demands
our absolute commitment. To be “sort of”
a disciple of Jesus, “kind of” a citizen of God’s kingdom, isn’t possible, any
more than you can be “sort of” pregnant.
With Christ, you’re all in, or you’re out. Jesus says, “Whoever is not with me is
against me” (Matt 12:30).
In
the early ages of Christianity, including the time when St. Luke was writing
his gospel, this total commitment to Jesus wasn’t theoretical. Thousands and thousands of people had their
property confiscated by the imperial authorities, were exiled, were condemned
to death because they loved Christ and were willing to carry their share of his
cross, more than they loved their possessions, their families, and even their
lives.
When
King Henry VIII imprisoned renowned scholar and statesman Sir Thomas More in
1534 and was trying to pressure him to accept his royal adultery and his
rejection of the Pope’s authority over the Church, one of the King’s tactics
was to use More’s family—his wife and children—to try to sway him, to get him
to yield and swear the oath that Henry demanded of everyone. It didn’t work. Thomas More loved his wife and family dearly;
he enjoyed his friends and his country estate.
But he died, as he said on the scaffold, “the King’s good servant, but
God’s first.” (If you haven’t ever seen
the movie A Man for All Seasons, I
highly recommend it to you. I’ll also
note that it won six Oscars, including “best picture,” in 1966.)
Sir Thomas More with his eldest daughter Margaret, in the Tower of London (source unknown) |
In
these days, as you know, our country is having a big debate about how to react
to the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against its own civilian
population. In the face of the
President’s wish to take military action “to send a message to Syria,” many
Americans and other people are asking questions like, “What’s the plan?”,
“Where is this going to take us?”, “How will other countries like Iran and
terrorist groups like Hezbollah react to what we do?”, as well as, “What are
the implications of not doing
anything?” and “What options do we have short of military action?”
Considerations
like those are like Jesus’ parable today of a king going to war
(14:31-32). Before you get into a war,
you calculate your resources and your enemy’s, your will and your enemy’s, and
other factors. Jesus isn’t talking about
politics and international relations, tho.
He’s talking about our commitment to the kingdom of God, about our
willingness to follow him completely.
When we prepare to do battle with the enemy of God, do we know what that
will cost us, and are we prepared for the cost?
The imperial authorities of the mass media and of our society’s
anything-goes morality and sometimes even of the government will try to pry us
away from God. Our materialistic,
consumer society will try to claim our allegiance. Our own passions—the 7 deadly sins of anger,
laziness, greed, envy, gluttony, lust, and pride—will try to lead us astray,
and we must be ready to deny them.
That’s harder than renouncing possessions. It’s really carrying our own cross and following
Jesus. It’s the way to the “true freedom
and an everlasting inheritance” that our opening prayer today spoke of, the way
of redemption and living forever with Jesus Christ our Lord.
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