This
passage includes a number of what biblical scholars refer to as the “hard
sayings” of Jesus: “hard” in the sense
of being both harsh in tone and difficult to understand. Hate your family. Give up your possessions. Prepare to die and follow me if you want to
be my disciple. This is not the kind of
thing one hears at workshops on church growth strategies!
One
way around these hard sayings is to treat them as if Jesus didn’t really mean
what he said: as if they could benefit from a better public relations
consultant to make the message a little more palatable. Another approach is to retain the hard edge
to the teaching, but maintain that it is an impossible ideal. It is a set-up for failure, showing us just
how far we are from the kingdom of God.
It is meant to demonstrate how much we need to acknowledge our faults
and repent. But it is not meant to teach
us about how to live our life. So, we
can admit how far we fall short of this ideal, and then go about our
lives.
I’d
like to suggest that while this teaching isn’t easy, neither is it
impossible. It is hard because it cuts
right to the heart of the fears that bind us and invites us to a new
freedom. We are presented with a choice,
and this choice is not without risk and sacrifice. What we choose will determine the shape of
our life, so we do well to count the cost.
Jesus
doesn’t mince words because what is at stake is too important and he wants to
make himself clear. The very fact of his growing popularity at
this point in his ministry makes Jesus suspicious that he is probably being
misunderstood. And so just when he is
drawing the biggest crowds of his career, Jesus drops these hard sayings on the
people like a bomb. He wants to draw a sharp distinction between
following the crowd and following him; between the usual consolations people
seek from religion and the self-surrender true religion demands. Let me repeat: this is not the sort of thing one hears at
church growth workshops.
The
usual consolations of religion are something along these lines: if you do X
(sacrifice the right calf, attend mass, make confession, obey your husband, pay
your tithe, obey the law) you will avoid Y (sickness, poverty, loneliness,
grief, punishment, eternal damnation).
This is the consolation of religion in its negative formulation –
avoiding curse.
It
also takes the form: if you do X then
you will gain Y (health, prosperity, respect, children, happiness, eternal
salvation). This is the consolation of
religion in its positive formulation – securing blessing. It is all about reward and punishment. Religion becomes a way of avoiding, or at
least coping, with suffering, and a way of self-fulfillment, happiness,
realizing your potential. It is an offer
of carrots and sticks to relieve our anxiety and boost our
self-importance. The problem is that it
doesn’t work; at least, it doesn’t work for very long.
The
reason is that religion practiced in this way remains all about me. It binds us more deeply to our fears in our
futile attempt to try to manage, control and manipulate God and others to feel
secure. The usual consolations of
religion serve to reinforce our willfulness.
We continue to be driven by fear in a thousand ways.
Jesus
offers us something other than the usual carrots and sticks. He invites us to relinquish self-will in
self-surrender to God. Following Jesus means abandoning ourselves to
God’s love in the way that Jesus abandoned himself to God’s love. This is a hard teaching, because falling
absolutely in love and embracing the demands of love makes us feel vulnerable
and overwhelmed. It means accepting that we are but a part of a
larger whole that is finally mysterious.
This mystery comprehends us; we do not comprehend it. Surrendering to the mystery of God means
leaning back into the flow of a love that we do not and cannot control. We just don’t know where it might take us.
The
only way to move past our fear and follow Jesus is to entrust ourselves to mystery
and surrender to love. Jesus has a very
sophisticated understanding of the main forms that fear takes in our
lives: fear of being ostracized, fear of
economic insecurity, and fear of punishment by authority.
“Hate
your family” means letting go of the need to please, manipulate, and control
our intimate relationships to manage our fear of abandonment and
loneliness. It means being free to go
against the grain of the crowd when the demand of love may require us to
sacrifice the approval and support of people we care about.
Jesus
goes onto to expand this to even “hating our life” or our “soul” – being
willing to let go of the sense of self we’ve carefully constructed, the persona
that protects us. Self-surrender to God
means refusing to cling to that identity if it inhibits our capacity to respond
to love.
“Selling
your possessions” means being willing to drop out of the rat race, indifferent
to the ladder of success however it is defined.
All the great saints of every tradition chose downward mobility. Why? So the fear of loss of material goods
would have no power over them; so that they would be free to love.
“Taking
up our cross” means being unafraid to risk the sanctions of social, political
and religious authorities when our commitment to love threatens them. In all these instances, the point is not that
family and friends should be shunned, or that possessions are bad, or that
authority should always and every be resisted.
The point is that if we allow them to define our identity, if we are
bound to them by our fear of losing their support, then we are no longer free
to follow Jesus. We are no longer able
to surrender to God in love.
When
Mom has to face the fact that her approval no longer determines your life
because you’ve surrendered to a greater mystery, it may feel to her like hatred.
When you are fired because you were unwilling to stay quiet about your
company’s unethical and even illegal practices, it may feel like you’ve lost
everything. Defying the authority of government to spy on its citizens and
punish whistle blowers may force you into exile or prison. How free do you want to be? You do well to count the cost.
Jesus
doesn’t care about carrots and sticks.
This is way beyond that. This is
about the kind of person you wish to be and the kind of world you wish to live
in. “Hate your family, sell your
possessions, and prepare to die if you want to follow Jesus” is an invitation
to freedom, to surrendering our small, fearful identities to realize our
participation in something much bigger.
When we embrace our identity as God's beloved, there is no longer
anything to fear, nothing to defend, no one to appease or impress.
Punishment and reward are transcended.
There is, finally, just being in love for love's sake.
“If
with God's help and without a presumptuous reliance on his own efforts someone
comes to win this condition, he will pass over to the status of an adopted
son. He will leave behind servility with its fear. He will leave
aside the mercenary hope of reward, a hope which seeks a reward and not the
goodness of the giver. There will be no more fear, no more desiring.
Instead, there will be forever the love which never fails.” (John Cassian, Conference X.9)
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