Luke
14:25-33
It’s
family that will always get to us. When
a 22-year-0ld woman named Perpetua was arrested in 2o3 for being a Christian,
she was threatened with a cruel death. The Romans were experts in brutality and
often displayed the instruments of torture they would use if people did not
deny their Christian faith. But the cruelest torture of all for Perpetua was
being separated from her infant son, and then having her elderly father brought
to her, who begged her in tears to renounce Christ and spare him and her child
the horror of her dying. That more than anything else wrung her heart and she
almost heeded his words. Almost. Jump ahead eighteen hundred years, and we’re
singing different verses of the same song. Martin Luther King, Jr. often
received death threats on the phone and in the mail, but what got to him more
than anything was when they started threatening his children. In all the years
of his civil rights work, that was the only thing that ever made him consider
carrying a gun. He almost did it. Almost.
If
we were to take a poll of everyone’s least favorite Gospel passages, today’s
reading from Luke would easily fall in the Top Ten, and might even make it to
Number One: Whoever comes to me and does
not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and
even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Even when we remember that the use
of “hate” here is just hyperbolic, an Aramaic figure of speech, and not a
literal command, the passage is still strong and disturbing. We might even hear
it to mean that God expects us to forsake all natural affections if we really
want to follow Christ.
But
that would be hearing this passage incorrectly. What is so moving in the
stories of Perpetua, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others I could name is
the deep love they had for their families. Their safety and emotional
well-being mattered to them immensely. They did not cease to care about them,
and they never came close to hating them or rejecting them. But Perpetua stood
her ground. During her interrogation, she said simply, “I am a Christian,” and
was then torn apart by wild animals in the arena at Carthage, leaving her son
motherless. Martin Luther King, Jr. continued to work for justice as he felt
led by Christ to do until the day he was shot dead, leaving his children
fatherless. They loved their families, but clearly they loved something else
even more.
The
Good News of Jesus Christ is never about rejection, it’s never about
constricting or diminishing our selves. It’s always about enlarging our selves:
expanding our hearts, opening our minds, deepening our trust, growing in our
ability to love and be loved. Jesus doesn’t sign anyone up to join a new
religion. He calls us to follow him in the way that leads to fullness of life,
a life lived in close communion with God and with other people. And he calls us
to follow him into that abundant life even when it causes distress or suffering
to us or to those who are nearest and dearest to us. And of course Jesus
himself didn’t escape this. There are few images more poignant and devastating
than depictions of a heartbroken Mary holding the dead and broken body of her
son after they take it down from the cross. Jesus was not the only one who paid
a price that day, as he well knew.
So
what are we to make of all this? One of the reasons this passage is so
disturbing is that, as a church community, we try to support families and
children. We don’t want to think that faith could ever cause any conflicts with
those we love or cause them harm. And certainly circumstances have changed
since Luke wrote his Gospel and faith in Christ could easily lead to
persecution and death, and would often cause pain to families and even tear
them apart. We would be naive, however, to think that we are somehow exempt
from this. I know that if I had focused on pleasing my unchurched parents, I
would most certainly not be standing up and preaching to you right now. Christ
can indeed call us in ways that bother or hurt the people we are closest to.
But
having said that, the real focus here is not just on families per se, but on
following Jesus even when it is costly to do so. When Jesus talks about bearing
our cross, as he does in this passage, he is not referring to just any
suffering, like having cancer or grieving the death of a loved one: he is
referring specifically to the suffering that comes from following him. And
since following him affects everything — our relationships, the way we spend
our time, the way we spend our money, the values we embrace, the public
policies we support — he teaches us that it is inevitable that we will come
into conflict with the broken world around us. It may or may not be with our
immediate families, but it will happen. In fact, if it doesn’t happen, if our
faith never makes us uncomfortable, if it never causes us to suffer in any way,
then we need to ask ourselves, “Why is that?” How real is our faith if it
changes nothing and costs us nothing?
Myself,
I can think of some ways that I pay a price and certainly ways that my family
pays a price. I can also think of many ways I resist paying the price and don’t
want to suffer for my faith. So I have no high ground to stand on as I preach
this. But for me, the crucial take away
from a reading like this is not how much am I willing to bear my cross but rather
how much am I willing to focus on the love and beauty of God. Because
ultimately that’s what makes it worthwhile to pay the price. Jesus devotes his
earthly ministry to showing us a way of being in this world that is so good, so
beautiful, and so fulfilling that we would want it, no matter how much we might
suffer for it. People like Perpetua, Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless
others down through the centuries had that vision: they could taste and see the
goodness of God, the beauty of God’s kingdom, and they knew it was worth paying
any price for, knew that in the end they, and their families, and the world
would be better off because of it. I don’t know what it will cost me, but I
want that same vision myself. I pray for that vision, for that faith, for that
love. And I invite you to do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment