We continue this morning our exploration of some of Jesus’ parables with a passage from Luke Chapter 9. Now some of you may be asking, ‘Why this passage? It doesn’t look much like a parable to me.’ Well, in the Middle East of Jesus’ day, the term actually covered pretty much anything from a few pithy words of comparison or illustration to those complete short stories we know so well. Here Jesus is getting over his points about the cost of being one of his disciples by means of three imaginative comparisons taken from what was for his listeners then the naturally, the socially, and the agriculturally familiar.
And so in order to avoid taking a view very popular in an increasing number of churches today – that of making the Scriptures fit our own social situation or personal agendas rather than allowing them to inform, question, and challenge these, we need to find out how Jesus’ original listeners would have understood these verses. Only then, I strongly believe, may we logically and honestly apply his teaching today to you and to me.
At last Wednesday evening’s Bible Study Group here in the church, having done such analysis with last Sunday’s parable, we were able to see very clearly the unrelenting wisdom of Jesus’ teaching and how it applies to us today as we seek to be genuine and committed disciples of his in this 21st century.
I met a man several years ago now who had come to this country to tell us what it was like to live unashamedly as a Christian in his home country where persecution was rife: sadly, after not very long here, he had come to the conclusion, from what he had seen of Christianity in Britain, that it was, for the most part, a pretty lukewarm and fair-weather affair. He had to try hard not to be scathing about much of what he saw – a watered down gospel preached from many pulpits, a weak-kneed and ineffectual discipleship the result of such preaching. He wasn’t a fanatic or a Fundamentalist; he just reckoned he owed Jesus and needed to show this in his life - much as the woman in last Sunday’s parable. He was a very attractive person with that rare kind of love and inner strength that is able to take you beyond your own sense of failure and inadequacy as a Christian and reassure you that God loves you and is just waiting for you to stop pretending or procrastinating or excusing and, instead, get to know him better and serve him.
And it was this passage that reminded me of much of what he saw as being weak and wet about Anglican Christianity in particular in this country. Now I realise that it is socially heretical – it always has been of course - to attack the tribal myths of how a country does its religion, especially when we find those myths so comforting or confirming of our own views of the world and our place in it. But Jesus did; and once we have understood, in the responses of these three would-be disciples here in this passage, the actual meaning of the words and the real sentiments behind them, we will be able to make our own responses to the challenges presented in this encounter – which of course is one of the main reasons why Luke recorded it for his readers!
Let’s take a closer look at the passage. Jesus and his disciples are walking along a road: two men offer to follow Jesus; a third he directs to do so. The first is drawn in to this wandering rabbi’s little community of followers but has not grasped what it truly means to be one of them in practice. Jesus perceives this but does not reject the would-be disciple’s offer: rather, he simply paints V58 a picture of suffering and total rejection, a picture, given the language he uses, that also has strong political symbolism. (The politics I’ll explain on Wednesday evening). Jesus responds to the would-be disciple’s offer to follow him by asking, in this indirect parabolic way, not only if he has really considered the hard truth that the cost of following him will necessarily invite suffering, privation, and rejection, but also that, if it is power and influence he is really after, then he has offered to follow the wrong person.
We are not told the outcome: this volunteer does not answer. As in many of the parables of Jesus, the parable is left suspended, inviting the listener or the reader to consider the matter and complete the conversation with his or her own response.
The second person is not a volunteer but, rather, is recruited. Jesus says to him, ‘Follow me.’ This is expressed, grammatically, as a command to begin to do something that the person has not yet done. Has Jesus perceived perhaps that this person is just a curious onlooker or half-hearted hanger-on who needs to make a decision about him? The man’s reply reveals that his heart is elsewhere and influenced more profoundly by social convention, by peer pressure. The phrase, V59 ‘Let me bury my father’, is not what you think it is. It does not mean that this man’s father has just died or even is about to die.
If he were, why is the man there? Why is he not already at his father’s bedside? No, the phrase is a traditional idiom, still coined in the Middle East today, that refers specifically to the duty of a son to remain at home and care for his parents until they are laid to rest respectfully. If a young man in the Middle East today, for example, expresses a wish to emigrate, a friend or relation may well ask, ‘Are you not going to bury your father first?’ In other words saying ‘surely you are not going to go until you have done your filial duty!’ Or in an argument between a father and a rebellious son one might easily hear a stinging rebuke from the father, ’You want to bury me?’ – meaning ‘you want me to hurry up and die so that my authority over you will be at an end?’
So you see the social expectation is that the man remain at home; and this man is saying to Jesus in effect, ’Do you really expect me to follow you now and violate the expectations of my community?’ Yet this is precisely what Jesus is saying: the Kingdom of God must be announced as present reality.
The spiritually dead can take care of the traditional responsibilities of your local community, but as for you, if you want to be my disciple, you cannot put it off. You need to choose which is the determining factor in your religion – me or social convention. It is a question that has not gone away and challenges us still today; people still honour the practice of conventional social religious practices more than they honour God – if they really honour him at all. And the Church of England, in its misplaced desire to keep everyone happy for fear of losing them - and their money, wastes much time on man-made or watered-down religious practices rather than liberating them with the message of the Gospel – a message that of course in so many ways challenges what society expects and even demands of the tame and toothless church it would much prefer. We must not forget that our welcome to all is still based on certain uncomfortable truths without which religious practice, however inspiring or consoling, is ultimately just another idol.
The third man V61, like the first, is a volunteer. He brashly offers to follow the master but has a precondition. Again, what seems to us in the West a perfectly reasonable request is in fact nothing of the sort. ‘Let me first say farewell to those at my home’ is a misleading translation of a phrase that ought to be translated, ‘Let me first take leave of those at my home.’ The difference is hugely important and vital to a correct understanding of the man’s offer to follow Jesus. It is not a case of the man asking Jesus if he may just first pop home and say goodbye to his folks. That did not happen in Jesus’ day; is does not happen still in the very formal, family-centred and paternalistic Middle East of today. This man is actually saying to Jesus that before he commits to following him he must first go home and ‘take leave of’ i.e. ask permission to go, from his father. Everyone listening to their conversation knows that naturally his father will refuse to let the man disappear on some highly questionable enterprise with a wandering rabbi who is already upsetting the religious, social, and political apple carts. The volunteer’s excuse is ready made: and of course Jesus sees through this shallow public demonstration of commitment; which is why he replies V62 in the way that he does, with an illustration about not looking back for fear of going off the way ahead.
So what Jesus is claiming here is an authority over the volunteer greater than that demanded by social convention – the authority of the father. The man’s reply had told Jesus that the man had not grasped that to follow him means to submit one’s life completely to him; a demand that still today is particularly shocking to well brought up young middle easterners for obvious reasons. In traditional Middle Eastern society a man would get up in the morning, first say his prayers, and then go to his father and mother to ask their blessing on the day and on whatever he plans to do. Tottenham and Walthamstow a few weeks ago!!
This is all serious stuff with serious choices being demanded – another of the many ‘hard sayings’ of Jesus on account of which we know, from the gospel records, many turned away. The person who cannot resolve the tension of conflicting loyalties and who keeps turning back to look over his shoulder at what the family is ordering is judged ‘unfit’ for the Kingdom of God. Jesus is saying that his authority must take precedence over all other relationships.
Such ideas really do go against the grain of most people today: but the liberating life-enhancing truth is that we can only really get our family relationships in a healthy perspective when we do allow the authority of Jesus to determine what will be. Why? Well because when we do not, we naturally tend to act selfishly rather than in the genuine interests of the other member of our family. And I have seen this in my pastoral ministry time after time after time. I think, for example, of a young man who wanted to serve Christ abroad in his gap year but was persuaded – one might even say threatened or blackmailed – into an internship in the City instead. Such decisions are tough; but each one of us, parent or child, has to make a decision about whose authority determines our life.
So, to sum up Jesus’ teaching here so that you and I may put ourselves in the shoes of those would-be disciples and ask ourselves the searching questions Jesus puts to each of them, we can see in the first dialogue that we need to consider seriously the cost of discipleship, discipleship of the Son of Man who is rejected still by many today. Are we willing to suffer the same rejection by some of our peers if we follow him?
What lessons from the second dialogue? Well, first, that Jesus commands us, if we want to be his, to proclaim the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom of which he is the unique agent of God. And, secondly, that the cultural demands of society are not acceptable excuses for failure in discipleship – irrespective of how long-standing and sacred the tribal myths about religion have become.
In the third dialogue we learn that the Kingdom of God must take precedence over all other loyalties; that the disciple with divided loyalties is a disruptive force in the work of the Kingdom; and that to ‘follow’ Jesus is not defined by him as feeling the glow of an inner warmth of consolation or as the light of intellectual insight, but is compared to the taking up of a strenuous, creative, consuming task like putting one’s hand to a plough and guiding a team of oxen.
Small wonder then that many found such a calling too ‘hard’. But think more of those who found in the call of Jesus to follow him - life. Today as then he leaves it up to each one of us to weigh up, on the one hand, the pressures, and on the other his promises: ‘Come to me all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’. ‘I came in order that they might have life, life in all its fullness.’ When we take Jesus, his love, his sacrifice for us, his promises, and discipleship seriously, that’s when life, life as God intended it, can really begin.
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