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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Christianity demands that those who wish to follow Jesus get acquainted with extremes. Not necessarily comfortable, but at least acquainted. The Gospel is after all one where the light shines in the darkness and the first are the last; where Christ is dead and descends into hell but also where Christ is risen and sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven; where those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for the sake of Christ will save it. Like I said, extremes. And this morning’s passage from Luke is no exception. Here we find three extreme and uncompromising conditions, set by Christ himself, for anyone who would wish to become one of his disciples. They deal with three loves: the love of family, the love of life, and the love of possessions. But apparently, these three loves are utterly incompatible with the way of Jesus and must be renounced entirely. The bar has been set; the line drawn. Who among us would ever presume to cross it? Who among us could dare consider themselves to be disciples of Christ? These are important questions, possibly even the questions. And yet I suspect that they
are probably not the ones that normally come to mind when we think of our religion. According to one Anglican writer, most of us are more or less inclined to think of the Christian life “as a static condition of not too exalted goodness” [1]. You know, the Christianity of moderate and reasonable. Agreeable to the general public. Medium-spicy. And so this sensible Christianity of “not too exalted goodness” is one that just about any decent person could follow with neither “overwhelming exertion” nor any expectation of further progress or struggle [2]. And we like it that way, because it means that we can be Christians in basically the same way that we’re tall or short or Midwestern. “Christian” is just who we are , give or take a few adjustments here and there. But then Jesus turns to the crowds -- turns to us -- and cancels the brunch. Passages like these serve as an abrupt wake-up call to Christians who live as we tend to live, as followers of a decidely not -extreme Christianity. So the question remains: who among us could dare consider themselves to be disciples of Christ? Now there are other parts of the Bible that seem to suggest the opposite of what Jesus is saying here. I say that not to excuse ourselves from Jesus’ teaching, but because we desire to be faithful interpreters of the Scriptures. So we immediately recall to mind the passages that tell us that the family is blessed by God and that our lives and our possessions are gifts from God. Why would Jesus have us hate what God has blessed and what God has given us? Let’s start where Jesus starts, with the family. Now we already know from Scripture that families are blessed by God. But we also know that Jesus commands us elsewhere to love our neighbors as ourselves. So when he tells the crowds that they must hate their families to be his disciples , the “hatred” has to be understood rhetorically, since families are all made up of neighbors and neighbors are to be loved. Jesus speaks of hating the family, however, to remind the crowds that there may well be those who are forced to make the choice between Jesus and their kin. And if they choose Jesus, it will effectively be as though they have indeed hated their families. Because that’s definitely what their townspeople will say, anyway. And this is exactly how many of the early Christians experienced the call to follow Christ in times of persecution. Especially if they were converts from pagan families and even more especially if they were women who were converts from pagan families. For them, to become a Christian was often a radical rejection of the social order, of the way things were done. Take St. Agatha, who was killed for her faith in the 3rd Century. The scandal of her conversion that led to her martyrdom was not just that she had become a Christian, though that was bad enough, but also that she had taken a vow of celibacy and thus renounced the life of marriage and family that was expected of her as a woman from a noble family. St. Agatha hated her family for the sake of Christ, not out of malice, but out of her unwavering devotion to Christ which was so intense that whatever love she had for her family became like hatred when compared to her love of our Lord. All that to say, being a disciple of Christ has very little to do with so-called “family values,” and the takeaway for those of us who aren’t likely to have to choose between Christ and our families is that we must resist turning the family into an idol and domesticating the Christian life into something quaint and respectable. Now to the love of life. The lives we live are gifts from God, as Scripture teaches. That makes us stewards of our lives, rather than their owners . None of us creates ourselves or chooses to be born into the world. We come into life as into an abundance that infinitely exceeds whatever we could deserve, as though we could ever deserve to live without being alive in the first place. So life is gift because life is grace. Which is why we are not our own, but rather exist to be presented back to God our Creator as a living sacrifice. Our selves, our souls, and bodies. Why then does Jesus command us to hate our lives and carry the cross in order to be his disciples? As with the family, there may come a time when a choice must be made between following Christ and protecting our lives. Martyrs like St. Agatha show forth this choice in the extreme, but there are in fact lots of less dramatic occasions where this same choice is presented to us. Each moment that we choose to clutch our lives as things which belong to us without remainder; when no matter how trivially, we cling to ourselves as to things which exist for us alone rather than as gifts that were given to be given , we set ourselves against the call of Christ. And it is this kind of love of life, a false love, that is to be hated, renounced, and yielded to the cross. “To live is Christ and to die is gain,” as St. Paul told the Philippians. And finally, the love of possessions. Like our lives, our possessions are also gifts from God. As the prayer we say at the Offertory puts it, “All things come of thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we given thee.” And since everything actually belongs to God, whatever property we happen to possess is only “ours” in a purely relative and provisional sense. Our possessions are gifts to be given. But possessions are complicated because the more possessions you acquire, the less they look like gifts. Or put another way, the more possessions you acquire, the more you’ll likely think of them as belonging to you in an absolute sense. They’re mine ; and because they’re mine , I can do whatever I want with them. I can acquire as much wealth as I please and enjoy and dispose of my property however I choose and I don’t have to justify any of it because it’s my right to do so [3]. Our whole social order is built on this thinking. We live in what R.H. Tawney called an “acquisitive society,” a society whose total interest and pre-occupation is “to promote the acquisition of wealth” [4] and which thereby “makes the individual the center of his own universe” [5]. An individual that is the center of their own universe is a rival god and the unbridled acquisition of wealth is one of the best ways to become the center of your own universe. Which is why Jesus exhorts people to give up their possessions throughout the Gospels. It’s not that the possessions are evil in themselves -- again, they’re gifts -- but rather that in their acquisition , they can have this strange effect upon the soul which turns it away from God and neighbor and inward to its own vice. So it’s no surprise that a society devoted to the acquisition of wealth like ours inevitably becomes one where systemic injustice reigns and the poor are oppressed. The prophets are abundantly clear on this. So turning to Christ’s call to give up all of our possessions, there are at least two ways of going about this. First, you can always pull a St. Francis and literally give away all your possessions to the poor and God bless you if you do. The saints who embraced voluntary poverty are to possessions what the martyrs are to life , as each in their own way embody the fullness of Christian discipleship in a single act of obedience. There are monasteries if you’re interested. But if not -- and that’s ok too -- you can still obey Christ’s call to give up your possessions by possessing them in a Christian way. Because our possessions are gifts, we can still possess them as gifts . But that means that we first have to discipline our desire for the acquisition of wealth and then possess what we do have as not our own, but as common, so that we can be ready to give them freely to those in need, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say [6]. In themselves, the three loves of family, life, and possessions are acceptible and pleasing to God, for they love nothing other than what God himself has given us. But these loves must be properly ordered. And because of our inclination to sin, they can only be properly ordered through an intense struggle of self-examination, repentance, and renunciation. Jesus singles out the love of family, life, and possessions precisely because they are such good gifts. That’s why our love for them so easily becomes distorted and idolatrous. If we wish to follow Jesus, we must always estimate the cost of discipleship. For this is not a religion of a “not too exalted goodness.” It is in fact a religion of nothing less than perfection itself -- and perfection is the ultimate gift that God will give to those who, with St. Paul, “regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Amen. [1] Kenneth E. Kirk. Some Principles of Moral Theology , 126. [2] Ibid, 126. [3] R.H. Tawney. The Acquisitive Society , 24. [4] Ibid, 29. [5] Ibid, 31. [6] St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 66, Art. 2
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