I’ve heard some right nonsense preached from pulpits, and who am I to break with tradition? What better chance to uphold nonsense than a gospel passage in which Jesus tells us we must hate our fathers and mothers, our wives and children, our brothers and sisters, our life itself, and give up all our possessions. I could avoid it.
I could instead talk about how Stephen Hawking has been implying that physics can explain why we are all here, or tell you about latest protest group planning to surprise the Pope when he visits.
It would be a lot of fun if I did that, but it wouldn’t be nearly as controversial as just sticking to what Jesus is saying in Luke 14:25-33. If we wish to learn, he says, hate father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, our life, and give up all our possessions.
The notion of an established church may say that religion is a very public matter and not a private hobby for nutters, and this is a very, very good thing. But it should never, ever fool us into thinking that the gospel is just sanctified common sense. Jesus’ advice to hate your family and your life and your possessions really is anything but respectable, established, common sense, and it is as well that we know it isn’t.
If you’ve ever met a group of people on holiday for the first time, or overheard strangers meeting one another, you’ll know that we humans tend to talk about where we come from, what we do for a living, who our relatives are, what we own and know, and so on. It can be sometimes quite boring in the face of the mystery of life.
On holiday recently I closed my eyes rather than go through it with one person. And it was the Irish novelist George Bernard Shaw who was once at a polite English society dinner party when he was asked by a lady if he was enjoying himself. “It’s about the only thing I am enjoying here,” he replied.
Nevertheless, where we come from and who our relatives are and so on still has purpose. It establishes a social existence, a set of conventions so people feel they know one another.
Without this socially constructed sense of existence, there might be no you, and that just wouldn’t make sense would it?
For example, in a job interview I was once asked: “So, who are you then?” But it’s not a static fact. I could spent a whole lifetime finding out, and it is something like this is which is going on when Jesus tells us that if we wish to learn, we must hate father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, life and possessions.
Jesus knows that in his culture, filial relations are primary, and so people seem to have no existence at all without their ties to blood relatives, and especially to parents. He knows that without a family, frankly, who are you? But then he also knows that these roles are all so very temporary and contingent, a very mixed blessing, which can cause as much pain as they can pleasure.
So he is confronting what he knows will fade into insignificance compared with what he considers to be the only real relationship and claim on our human loyalty. What he is asking is this: Are you really no more than the product of social mirrors, or are you a child of God?
Jesus’ requirement for you to hate your family may of course be Semitic exaggeration, and the heightened language should not be pressed too literally. We know that Jesus cared for his mother at the foot of the cross. But we also know that his family thought he was going out of his mind. So the point is still the same.
Blood ties and personal property cannot and will not have the greatest claim on us. They will both disappear, and it is best to accept this now rather than later, or life can be hell. Building a watch-tower to protect your property or defend your city is pointless if they are both transient resources. As Jesus says in Mark 8:36, what will anyone gain by winning the world but losing their true self?
They say hold onto what you can in this life. Consciousness is an accidental by product of the brain, and beyond death there is oblivion and no awareness.
And maybe this is common sense, because it is a convention. But it is like saying that if you smash a television so that the images die, then the radio waves outside the house will also be destroyed.
If you wish to learn, Jesus says, relegate your claims on what has ultimate meaning for you. Hate your father and mother, your wife and child, your brother and sister, your life, and your possessions, which is to say, discipleship turns the world’s values upside down.
It takes a commitment. You have to chose between common sense and discipleship. As someone once said, it really is no measure of health at all to be very well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
And just think, said Fr Anthony De Mello, about someone who is afraid to let go of a nightmare, because that is the only world he knows. This is actually a picture of you, if you are not ready to see father, mother, and yes, your own life and possessions for what they are.
If you wish to attain lasting happiness, stop clinging to them, and whether you keep them or not, they lose their power to hurt you.
Spend some time seeing everything you cling to for what it really is. You cling and crave to them because they cause you some good feeling, some excitement and pleasure, but they also cause you worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, and fear.
Of course, you cannot renounce the world - it is here. But you can be happy without clinging to it. Your future and the world’s future depends on your response to the gospel, the good news that you are a child of God, not a child of the state, a child of biological ties, a child of social or commercial pressures, or social existence.
The Church may be respectable, but the gospel is anything but respectable common sense. After all, in common sense, they say, love is blind. But actually it is attachment which is blind. Love is very clear sighted, and if we wish to be disciples of Jesus, making the most of our gifts means risking them, not playing them safe.
Then we can experience that mysterious state which cannot be uttered or named, and begin to understand that if we loosen our grasp inwardly, we are repaid a hundred times over, by gaining eternal life. +
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