Challengings Koans of Jesus

16 Pentecost, Cp18, September 8, 2013

Deuteronomy 30:15-20   Psalm 1

Philemon 1-20 Luke 14:25-33

Lectionary Link
  

What if I had the following requirements for joining St. John's parish?  Hate your father, hate your mother, hate your wife, hate your children, hate your brother, hate your sister, hate your life, actively seek death on a cross and sell all your possessions.

  You might say, "No thanks, that's an impossible and undesirable standard for me.  I think that I'll try St. Swithin's down the road instead. I think they have different family values there."

  These words are troublesome for us to understand.  People who are very literal about biblical meanings twist their interpretations into pretzels to make sense of these sayings and atheists too like to remind us how we Christians have these "crazy" words of Jesus.

  You pay me the big bucks to tell you exactly what these words of Jesus mean but I'm going to punt.  I must confess that I do not know exactly what these words mean.  What I can do is present a range of meanings for these words. On the surface these words seem harsh and inconsistent with valuing one's life, honoring one's parents and family as prescribed in the Ten Commandments.  They are also contradictory with other words of Jesus elsewhere, like how is it we're supposed to love our enemies and those who hate us but we're supposed to hate our family and our own lives?  Surely something is lost in the translation.

  How about if I were to present you with a range of possible meanings and in doing so we cannot treat this Gospel writing like a scientific logical syllogism but we might understand the mood that this literary saying is trying to invoke for our spiritual lives.

  In Zen Buddhism, a disciple learns spiritual enlightenment by having the logical mind baffled so that hidden meanings can be understood.  A roshi or master will give the disciple a riddle to ponder.  These riddles are called koans.  Probably the most often quoted koan is this: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  We might learn to read the Gospel sayings of Jesus as words which baffle the logical mind in order for us to pierce another level of enlightenment.

  In trying to achieve a range of meanings, a first meaning might be an ironic reading of these harsh words.  "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?"  By reading these words of Jesus with different intonation, the exact opposite meaning is implied.  It could be that when oral tradition was written down, the intonation patterns of the preachers were lost.  If we use an ironic reading of these words, the meaning becomes clear:   "If you think that being my disciple is bad for your family and your life, then you really misunderstand me."  This ironic reading has some merit in the context because it comes after excuses that people were giving for not following Christ.  Some of the excuses had to do with family obligations, so the ironic reading of these words have a fairly crisp meaning.  Don't make your family an excuse for not following Jesus.

  The meaning of the words of Jesus are qualified by the conditions and the spirituality within the early Christian communities.  To bear one's cross and to die to oneself was a spiritual method found in the writings of St. Paul.  St. Paul wrote that "he had been crucified with Christ but he continued to live so there was an old self which died and a new self that had been born."  The word for life in the Gospel reading is "pseuche" or soul life.  Dying to one's soul life is not physical death but it means dying to one's former versions of self, family and possessions.  Pauline spirituality was based upon the continual process of dying to oneself and taking on new life.  Words like dying and hate are extreme words which are used, not to imply physical violence or the social shunning of one's family; they are extreme words to denote the profound attitude shifts which was taking place in the process of spiritual transformation.

  These words were probably very sensitive to the quite eclectic membership of the early churches.  Following Jesus and joining the Christian family meant significant change and possible opposition especially if the other members of one's family of birth were still loyal to the cult of the Emperor and the gods of the Roman Empire, or if they were still members of synagogues which had excommunicated the followers of Christ or even if they were members of the continuing community of John the Baptist.  It is important to remember that the Gospels were written in a time when the members of the church came from families that were often in religious conflict and so persons who wanted to follow Christ did have some very serious loyalty issues, a loyalty dilemma that one does not want to face.  It seems like a very unfair decision: follow Christ and lose my family.  Such undesirable dilemmas do occur in the history of faith communities and such dilemmas were the formation conditions of the early Christian communities.

  Another condition within the early churches was one of chief beliefs of various members.  Many of the leaders of the early Christian church like St. Paul came from the apocalyptic fatalism of certain strains of Judaism of the time.  Many Jews believed that the long suffering of their people and the occupation of their country required from their understanding of Hebrew Scriptures and other writings, a coming of a Messiah who would intervene and bring justice to the earth.  Jesus of Nazareth in his first coming was not a military king; so many persons within the Christian community believed that Jesus would come back quite soon after his resurrection and he would return as a Davidic Messiah.  If you believed that Jesus was coming back tomorrow, why get married, why raise a family, why get involved in the family business, why own property and possessions?  Such believers tended to be world hating and world denying since they believed that the world as they knew it would soon end.  St. Paul himself believed this; he even suggested that it was better for people to be unmarried as he was so that they could be in Spartan condition for dealing with the end times by getting the Gospel to as many people as possible.

  The early church also had a very radical sociology.  The early church had a radical notion of Christian family.  In the community of St. Paul, they believed that in Christ there was no Jew, no Greek, no Gentile, no male, no female, no slave, no free but a new creation.  Jewish society and Roman society had very strict definitions of family and social caste, so can we understand how radical that this new Christian equality was?  Everyone was equal in Christ even though they had different roles in society.  The letter to Philemon was a letter that St. Paul wrote to the slave owner of Onesimus.  Onesimus had run away from the home of Philemon; he had become of follower of Christ and a disciple of St. Paul.  So Paul wrote Philemon a letter to receive Onesimus back into his household without punishment.  He was to receive Onesimus back as a brother in Christ, even though he was a slave who was owned by Philemon.  So within the early church, the equality of Christian baptism made the spiritual family more important than one's flesh and blood birth.  The Gospel of John writer wrote:  To those who believed in Jesus, he gave power to be sons of God, not born of the will of man or the will of the flesh but of God.

  Can we appreciate the extreme poetry of this radical notion of Christian family?   If we understand the radical notion of Christian family, then the harshness of the words of the oracle of Christ within the early churches can be understood in the context in which they were first delivered.

  These words of the oracle of Christ have troubled literal readers at different times in the history of the church.  One could actually say that the monastic movement was born from these radical words of Jesus.  People who went to the monastery hated their personal ambitions, their family relations and personal possessions as they followed the counsels of perfection: poverty, chastity and obedience.  The reason that the church has a tradition of celibacy for clergy and religious is in part because of these harsh words of Jesus.  The monastic life is founded on the communalism that is found in the record of the early church of people having all things in common.

  So what about us today?  We hope and pray that our family relationships don't conflict with our devotion to Christ.  We accept today that the end of the world did not happen during the time of St. Paul and so we do not live in the same way in which some of the early Christians did.  We don't feel like we have to be communal in our lifestyle.

  Just as the early Christians had to find a way to be obedient to Christ within their own circumstances, you and I need to find the very best way to be loyal to Christ given the specific circumstances of our own lives.  We cannot use the situations of the time of the early churches as prohibitions to suggest that our life situations should be the same as it was then.  Faith in Christ means that we need to find meaningful and engaging ways to follow Christ today with good and true hearts in the unique situations of our own lives.

  Today, I wish you every good blessing as you seek to give Christ a special place in your life.   I hope your family supports you in your devotion to Christ.  And I hope that our devotion to Christ will be winsome toward the people whom we want to know God’s love. Amen.