(Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 12:49-56) (Pentecost 10)
18 August, 2019 – © Bill Bush
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength, and my Redeemer.
If there are two Bible readings that challenge me, one is the Luke passage we heard today: “households will be divided: father against son, son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother”. Fair enough, perhaps one might understand mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law not getting on so well but kids and their mums and dads!?
If anything the Luke passage that we read about a month ago is even more challenging. Jesus replied to the would be young disciple who reasonably asked before following Jesus “first let me go and bury my father” to which Jesus replied, harshly to my ear, “let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk 9:59).
These passages concerned me at a personal level and because they jar with other kinder biblical passages.
What do they say of me when I flew back from England for Christmas because I was concerned for the health of my parents, particularly of my mother, only to receive the news a fortnight after I had returned that my father, so hale and hearty at the airport when we parted, had died? Was it appropriate for me to fly back to attend his funeral? And then, years later, what of the leave I took from work to care for the mother who had largely ceased to recognise me as her son?
I am reproached by the memory of my Scottish great-grandfather Alexander Murdoch who in October 1861 at 33 left his 75 year old mother in Paisley to serve on the other side of the world in Victoria as a Minister of the Presbyterian Free Church? 150 years on I am still moved by the hurried letter that his mother, Elizabeth, wrote to him while his ship was still in home waters under control of the pilot: “I think there is much cause for gratitude to us all,” she wrote. “How different it would have been had you gone alone. That was a horror I could not get over but now you have the desire of your heart with you, surely I need not make myself miserable when I know you are happy.” She added that Alexander had left behind one of his best shirts and three good collars. These she would send on.
For Alexander had with him my great-grandmother Catherine, the eldest daughter of a close knit Port Glasgow family. They had married just four months before.
Was I not fit for the kingdom of God for the attention that I paid my parents? Does the current ease of movement from one corner of the earth to another courtesy of technology and the wealth of the society into which I am born, reconcile the priorities of my life and my faith?
Was I not honouring the commandment to honour my parents?
I have no choice but to face up to the existence of a tension between these Bible passages. I shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible reflects the realities of this world where surveys tell us that all too often family life is riven with discord and even violence.
The paradoxes of the Bible reflect the paradoxes of life. Perhaps perversely I am comforted by the frustrations of God as recorded by Isaiah towards his chosen people of Israel. A clearly frustrated God expostulates of those on whom he has showered divine favours: “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes why did it yield wild grapes?” Isaiah explains that God in this celestial outburst “expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry.” A commentator puts it this way: “This passage reads as though Isaiah were trying to create a point-by-point description of our own contemporary society: think about it, the mindless pursuit of physical pleasure, addiction to entertainment, the feverish acquisition of more and more stuff, the public contempt for God’s Word and truth by an age that is wise in its own sight, the insistence that wrong is right and that even believing in right is wrong.”
In the Isaiah story, in spite of all the challenges we throw out to him, God does not give up on us.
The fix I was in concerning my parents was trivial compared to the tension between the challenge to love even our enemies – its self a commandment that can be used to manipulate women to submit to situations of continuing domestic violence and abuse.
Our challenge is to negotiate these tensions: we are to love our God with all our heart and all our strength and our neighbour as yourself. The example of Jesus demonstrates that the path of discipleship is not easy. Our faith challenges us to reach out to the unthinkable.
For it is in the realm of the unthinkable, of the miraculous, that the kingdom of heaven is found. Perforce it is for me/for us all to face up to the existence of a tension in what is expected of us.
Indeed, tension and paradox is at the heart of Christianity. How else can one reconcile with these other passages the teaching of Jesus that we should “take up [his] yoke and learn from [him]” (Mt. 11:29) “for,” as he added, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”?.
Just possibly, it is in the turmoil and confusions of the realities of this world that beauty and peace reside, where we who, in the words of Jesus recorded by St Matthew, “are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, . . .”, will find rest “. . . For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Mt. 11:28,29).
This brings to mind the answer by Jesus to the question of his disciples: “When will the kingdom come?” (And here I quote from the ancient Coptic Gospel of Thomas that did not make it into the biblical canon.)
“It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.” (§113)
Love is the fundamental force that holds the chaotic elements of the universe together.
In the words of perhaps my favourite hymn:
“Love so amazing so divine
demands my life my soul my all.”
The kingdom may indeed be hiding in plain sight in the ordinary. Rest and restlessness, let us rise to the challenge and rejoice in the paradoxes of our faith.
May I suggest as a bridge this prayer of St Francis of Assisi? –
Grant that we may not seek so much as to be consoled, as to console:
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For in giving we receive, in pardoning we are pardoned,
And dying are born to eternal life, Amen.
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