OIL AND WINe

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Verna Holyhead sgs

Print Friendly

 

Print Friendly

 

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time 

5 September 2010

 

• Wis 9:13-18b  • Ps90 (89):3-6, 12-17  • Philemon 9-10, 12-17  • Luke 14:25-33

With many places celebrating Father’s Day this Sunday, it may be rather shocking to hear the gospel proclamation to ‘hate’ father – and all the other members of one’s family, so it is important to realise that in Jesus’ mother-tongue, ‘to hate’ was an idiomatic expression that tried to make a point by exaggeration. In Jesus’ mother-tongue, ‘to hate’ really meant ‘to love less,’ or ‘to prefer’ something more than another, or one course of action to another which may be a good in itself. All languages have idioms that native speakers easily recognise. ‘The whole of Canberra’ doesn’t mean the total population, but its population of politicians. We don’t ring the RSPCA when it’s ‘raining cats and dogs’; we just reach for our umbrellas! In one of his homilies for the Year of Luke, Geoffrey Plant refers to the film (and later stage play) Billy Elliot, the fictional story of a miner’s son, set in 1984 during the British miners’ strike. Billy’s mother has died the year before, and his father sends Billy to learn the masculine art of boxing at the local village hall. But it is there that Billy sees a girls’ ballet class that shares the venue. Billy becomes entranced with the dance, and, unbeknown to his father, exchanges his boxing gloves for the preferred ballet shoes! The reaction of his father is predictable, but despite Billy’s love for him, Billy has to ‘hate’ his father’s preference and his brother’s embarrassment, and accept to be regarded as a ‘poof’ and ‘sissy’ in the family and in his school and town.  But Billy follows his dream through many sacrifices and hard times, until his acceptance by the Royal Ballet School and his father’s eventual acknowledgement of Billy’s rare talent, and a consequent deepening of their loving relationship. 

Jesus’ audience is no longer his group of table companions, but the great crowds who gather around him as he continues on his journey to Jerusalem. Jesus cannot leave these people under any illusion about what following him will entail. He wants to make sure that they know how much it will cost them to be a disciple of a man heading for passion and death. The price to be paid is not cheap; to use Dietrich Bonhöffer’s distinction; it will be ‘costly grace’ that, like Jesus, cost Bonhöffer his life under the Nazi regime only three weeks before the end of World War II in Europe. But cheap grace, Bonhöffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship means that a would-be disciple:
…places himself at the Master’s disposal, but at the same time retains the right to dictate his own terms. But the discipleship is no longer discipleship, but a program of our own to be arranged to suit ourselves, and to be judged in accordance with the standards of rational ethic.

Is it ‘rational’ to choose to suffer, to cope with the consequences that such a choice may have for oneself and one’s loved ones…? Only if there is One who is loved more than all others: the suffering Servant whose cross we dare to carry, knowing that he always bears its greater weight and will lead us into the New Jerusalem of eternal life.

To impress this hard teaching on his followers, Jesus tells two parables, both of which underline the wisdom of not beginning something unless you are willing to give the project everything you’ve got. In gospel terms, the ‘everything’ of discipleship may mean that we have to be willing to suffer and die for the ‘project’ of the kingdom. Our Australian media has recently been full of criticism (just or unjust) of government school building programs which, in some cases were not well planned, or where the cost calculations did not add up. Consequently, the government, the educational authorities, the architect, some one’s reputation, suffers for mismanagement or short-sighted stupidity. So with the builder in the parable who did not sit down and calculate the cost of the tower he proposed to build, but could only finance the foundations and then go no further, The second parable emphasises the same point, but in a different context. Here is it a king who is engaged in the serious business of war. If his intelligence forces report to him that his enemy has twice the number of combat troops at the ready, he would be foolish if he did not sit down and calculate what his chances of success were against such a formidable enemy before advancing, or whether it would be wiser to try to come together negotiate for peace. Both the builder and the king are men of substance, and it seems that Jesus is directing these parables especially at those who have some status and possessions and who would need to ‘bid farewell’ to these if they are to be free and determined enough to follow Jesus. 

What are the metaphorical and contemporary ‘towers’ or ‘war,’ for which we have a wild and often ill-considered enthusiasm? The gospel demands of us a long haul, and that we go into training for staying power when ridicule, subtle persecution, or dismissal of our Christian commitment is treated as harmlessly quaint or ridiculously irrelevant. Like the image of the king who should sue for peace with his stronger opponent, this can remind us of the need to confront those in our small or larger world who have double or more the resources of the poor, and to work for a just distribution of these resources so that all can live in peace as sisters and brothers. Jesus’ final comment is that unless our discipleship is flavoured with our first preference for Christ, it will be ‘insipid,’ tasteless,’ something to be discarded like salt that is useless because it has lost its taste.

All this may seem great foolishness, but the first reading from the Book of Wisdom reminds us how limited our human wisdom really is. Unless we are extraordinarily arrogant, experience teaches us that it is difficult to be insightful and intelligent about the earthly, everyday flow of life around us. Very often our minds seem to be teeming with distractions, flitting from one idea to another without thinking anything through, caught up in virtual realities, or so eager for outside stimulation that silent alternatives to the mobile phone or removal of ear plugs seem a great deprivation! Yet this reading proclaims that if this is our human situation, how can we ever know anything of the mystery of God without God’s Spirit to guide us? How can we see the reflection of God’s presence in people and places and the planet without the insight of the gift of divine wisdom? And to enable us to see in a way that was not available to the authors of the Old Testament, in the fullness of time God’s wisdom took flesh and lived among us so that we might more surely learn “the wisdom of heart” for which we pray in today’s responsorial psalm.

Ps 90 (89) is often part of funeral liturgy, when memory and grief, and sometimes guilt and regret, make us particularly sensitive to the passing of time and relationships, not only with those who have died, but also with God. The psalmist at first voices the assembly’s pain because of trouble and transience of human life, the common experience of yearning for the constant and the lasting. Out of this yearning is born the faith in an eternally caring and faithful God who in every age contrasts with our time-bound humanity. This offers the same comfort as that expressed by Isaac Watts in his great hymn, “O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. It is this that should fill us with exultant joy of the last stanza that we pray today.

The second reading is from the Letter to Philemon, the shortest (only twenty-five verses long) and most intimate of Paul’s letters, probably written from prison in the late 50s or early 60s. Addressed to Philemon, a leader of a house church, it is also a call to the wider church to be transformed by love and pastoral concerns that will create new family relationships within the household of the church. Paul and Philemon both have decisions to make and priorities to which they must be faithful as followers of Christ. One of Philemon’s slaves, Onesimus, had made his own decision to run away from his master, and somehow found his way to Rome and made contact with Paul, “an old man now,” and a prisoner of the Roman Empire because he is a prisoner of Jesus Christ. This contact with Paul had resulted in Onesimus becoming a Christian, as indeed Philemon had himself earlier become through Paul’s influence. Paul has a deep affection for Onesimus that he likens to a father for a son, and his human preference is to keep the slave with him as ‘useful’ (‘Onesimus’ means ‘useful,’ and was a common name for a slave) in his ministry, and as friend in his loneliness. But he decides to send Onesimus back to Philemon, carrying not only Paul’s letter that is both explanation and challenge, but also as part of Paul’s own self, “my own heart.” For the three of them – Paul, Philemon and Onesimus – there is a priority of relationships that must be obeyed as a consequence of their transforming love of Christ. It was not possible for Paul to demolish the imperial structures of slavery but, at the personal level, each one of them can make a radical response for Christ. Paul will sacrifice Onesimus’ friendship for the greater good of the transformation of the relationship of Philemon and Onesimus when the slave returns. In Philemon’s household there should be a small revolution that will be evident to the church that meets there, and to the surrounding locality: a revolution of forgiveness rather than puishment, so that Philemon receives back Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother…” For Onesimus, it will be the courageous decision to obey Paul as his letter carrier – and face the risky consequences with his newly-found faith in Christ.

This beautiful little letter alerts us to the importance of individual and local church activity that defies social conventions and advocates for and witnesses to the justice that may seem impossible to achieve on a larger scale. The tone of the letter also says something about the exercise of authority, for Paul writes to Philemon not with heavy-handedness but with gospel persuasiveness and with the freedom of mature old age in the loving service of Christ.

Benedict had no time for wild enthusiasms. Newcomers to the monastery were not to be received as though they were God’s gift that had just landed on the doorstep. Instead, they were encouraged, like the builder and king of Jesus’ parable, “to sit down and estimate the cost” of admission to the monastery and then to the novitiate. The candidate was to be left in no doubt about the presence of the cross in the choice of religious profession (cf. RB 58.1-14). Today’s threshold experience may be expressed more in the ways of spiritual direction and psychological testing so that the person considering the way of life can be helped with self-knowledge and deeper knowledge of God in their human relationships, but realistic discussion of these is a kinder way of formation than the dishonest fostering of immature and impatient fervour. There is the similar need to accept that no marriage is a continual honeymoon, that there will be costs and crosses in the relationship. There is the consequent need for prayerful discernment, honest conversation between the couple, and skilful marriage preparation sessions  involving both professionals and peers to help them meet the realities that their love must face. For every Christian, in or beyond the monastery, and no matter what the lifestyle, Benedict’s summary of discipleship comes in the simple words: “Prefer nothing to the love of Christ” (RB 4.21), and its one-word expansion after a life of expanding love of Christ (cf. RB Prol 49) when Benedict dares to write in his ‘last will and testament’ of RB 72, and rather like the wise and ageing Paul: “Let them prefer absolutely nothing to Christ” (RB 72:11).  

 

 

 

 

 

 


.

 

 Past Reflections

Previous Reflections
Oil and Wine