Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“And to another Jesus said, ‘Follow me.’ But he replied, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but let me go first and bury my father.’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let the dead bury the dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ And another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.’ To him Jesus said, ‘No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” Lk. 9: 59-62
I have a public confession to make.
I don’t like this Gospel reading.
I don’t like being told that, in order to follow Jesus, I can’t bury my father. I don’t like being told that, in order to follow Jesus, I can’t first say farewell to my family at home. I don’t like being told, in order to follow Jesus, I can’t take care of my business which supports my family.
I don’t like being told that there are matters more important than house and home and real estate and domestic priorities, even children.
Do you?
Certainly, I want to be a follower of Jesus, but isn’t he going a little too far here? What am I supposed to do, leave everything behind as though I have no responsibilities?
These words of today’s Gospel reading are very troubling ones, and my guess is they are bothersome to you as well.
So why is Jesus saying them?
When together we calm down and start to look a little closer at what Luke is trying to tell us in this Gospel passage, perhaps we’ll all admit that these seemingly harsh words begin to make a little more sense.
For example, at the time in which Jesus was speaking, we must remember that the family was a primary value. Jewish families at that time were controlled by the indisputable authority of the father. Everyone lived in submission to his authority. When the father died, then, his burial was a son’s most important and sacred duty. It was also the sacred moment when the authority and control of his family passed on to the son.
What Jesus is saying is that, as sacred as that obligation to bury one’s father is, God’s plan comes first. What God has in mind for us is the only thing that really matters in the long run, because it’s the only thing that will last against all odds.
The same is true for “saying farewell to my family at home.” The problem Jesus is pointing to here is that family, marriage, and children are commonly used even to this day as excuses for not walking a spiritual path.
What Jesus is trying to do, then, is teach two things:
- Jesus is calling each of us to share his own passion for God and his total availability for the service of God’s reign in this world. He wants to light a fire that will burn in our hearts just like it does in his. He is asking us once again not to worship him or praise him or adore him or create dogmas concerning him. He is asking us to do one thing: follow him. He’s inviting us to be as committed to the reality of his father’s infinite love as he is.
- Jesus wants us to join him in creating a new kind of family. He wants us to leave this patriarchal, dominating, often abusive kind of family behind, and begin forming a family united by the common desire to do God’s will. As Jesus says at another point in one of the Gospels, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” He wants us to no longer be held together merely by the ties of blood or economic interests. He wants us to no longer be bound by the need to defend our social status and be driven by “what will people think of us?” He wants us instead to become converted people – people who are committed to equality and to loving service.
This is the ultimate legacy Jesus wants each of us to leave behind to the next generation: becoming a family of sisters and brothers in service to the smallest and the most helpless. This will be the ultimate sign of God’s reign in this world.
In other words, Jesus is re-imagining what the word “family” can be.
He’s asking us to take the risk of coming together as men and women who will be witnesses to the rest of the world of what life would look like if we were willing to be transformed by the same vocation and the same mission that Jesus himself was called to by the Father.
I have to admit that, even after considering all of this, I still don’t “like” what he’s calling us to, but then that’s what Jesus is all about, isn’t it? He’s about stretching us, pulling us out of our small selves, introducing us to something bigger and richer and fuller. He’s about taking us to a new level of living.
Our egos, of course, will always want to say “no.” We will always resist leaving the familiar and the comfortable for the more risky and the more challenging.
But we need to remember that this is the same journey Jesus himself took and the same one in which he promises to “be with us always”:
Through the Eucharist, through the Scriptures, through a life of prayer, through our new family of transformed, “resurrected” men and women.
“Follow me,” Jesus tells us.
His command reminds us that each moment of our lives – even the most demanding, even the most ordinary – holds the possibility of encountering and fully embracing the sacred.
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
