13th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle C 21-22
THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21 | Galatians 5:1, 13-18 | Luke 9:51-62
Oh God, who the grace of adoption shows us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
We begin this period called ordinary time with a focus on one of the evangelists, and this year it’s Luke. Last year it was Mark, the year before, Matthew, and so I want to say a few words about his gospel as we proceed in looking at his reflections on the life and times of Jesus, the responses of the disciples, the responses of the people that were healed and transformed by him. And one of the things unique about Luke is he is the longest gospel and the one with the most detail, and you may remember this, that Luke is also the author of the Acts of the Apostles. So he not only recorded the period of time when Jesus was gathering together a group of human beings, his disciples, and hoping that they would understand and be able to follow in his footsteps, which they were ultimately, but their growth and change was mostly at the end when the Holy Spirit descended upon them and they put all the pieces together. Most of the time you see the disciples not figuring out who Jesus is. But the beauty of Luke’s gospel also is he has Jesus in a disposition at the end of his ministry where he is realizing that he has to return to Jerusalem. So for ten chapters, all the stories of Jesus’ miracles and teachings with his disciples takes place in the last part of his life. Now, how long that was, months, weeks, I’m not sure, but one thing that does, in a way, make sense to me is that, when Jesus died and rose, obviously the disciples knew the story was important, and they had to record it. They had to hold onto it. They had to teach it and tell people who Jesus was, and it would seem that the things they remembered most were the things that happened most recently.
So just remember, we’re looking at a Jesus in the gospel of Luke who realizes his life, his goal, what he desired is not necessarily what he hoped for. At least that’s my understanding and many’s understanding, that Jesus entered into his public ministry with a longing to transform the temple. He longed to break into their illusions and their addiction to the law and power over people and to open their eyes to see that this is not what God intended the temple to be, and he was teaching and preaching for years. In fact, he started his teaching at 12, and he ended it at 33. But the ending is so important, because the ending of the ministry of Jesus, if there was anything in his humanity — and I can’t imagine Jesus being anything other than the most human of human beings, filled with not sin but all the struggles, all the doubts, all the wondering, all the hopes, all the dreams, all that. If he didn’t have that, he wouldn’t be like us, and he was like us perfectly. We are like him, and so he had to struggle with things. And I would think that the biggest struggle he had was his goal of preaching and teaching and people understanding him and seeing the beauty of who he was and who God intended them to be. It just didn’t happen during his life The disciples didn’t get it. You see it in the gospel today. James and John, toward the end of Jesus’ ministry, which talked of peace and non-violence, and the minute there’s a problem with people not accepting Jesus, they want to rain down fire on them. Jesus says, “No, no. No, stop it.” Or in this gospel — it’s not in this passage or in this chapter, rather, of Luke — you see Jesus revealing the fact that he has to die and he has to surrender to something horrific in order to become who God wants him to be and to teach what God wants him to teach. And Peter says, “God forbid you should ever do that.” And Jesus calls him Satan.
So we have a very, very interesting context in which to listen and pay attention to this figure Jesus, whose goal, his sole goal is to share with people the inheritance that is theirs. And what is that inheritance? It’s pretty clearly stated in the Responsorial Psalm. “You are my inheritance. You show me a path to life, fullness of joy in your presence, delight at your hand forever.” God’s desire, his longing through the ministry of his presence in the human Jesus, who is also God, is saying, “I want to take you on a path that leads you to something that is filled with joy and delights.” Life is supposed to be good. It really is. So why is it we have seemingly so much pain and so much suffering? Well, I think it’s because that’s the way it’s supposed to be, because we live on this world for a time. And that time is called our path, and what God longs for is, in that path, just our time here — sometimes it’s 20 years, 5 years, 50 years. I’m up to 82 years. Whatever that time is here on this earth, we are engaged in something, and our way of engaging in it has a deep impact on the rest of humanity. That’s a very hard thing to grasp, but as you respond to grace and change and grow, so does all those, in a sense, participate in that evolution of consciousness. And when we fail, it holds back people, and so the challenge is for us to enter into this path and to know what it’s like.
So let’s look at two major themes we find throughout the Old and New Testament. One of the beauties of going back to these stories over and over again, you see patterns that you never saw before, and one of the biggest patterns you’ll see from the beginning of time and God’s speaking to us as one who longs to save us is that you are here in this world to learn something. And that’s how to move from slavery to freedom. Slavery to freedom, that’s our goal, and what is slavery best represented by? A law and a rule that has power over you, forcing you to do things out of an obligation, usually of if you don’t, you’ll be punished, and also some kind of carrot that says if you do what you’re told to do, not what you want to do, not what you feel you should do, but if you’ll do what someone else tells you to do, you’ll be rewarded. And that’s the greatest temptation on this path, because the challenge is not to surrender to a power greater than yourself that is of the world, of the flesh but to surrender to an inner voice, who you really are, who God intends you to be. So along with this journey from slavery to freedom, there is the calling you see in the gospel of — or throughout scripture, Old Testament, New Testament, of God entering into someone’s life and calling them to be a witness for him to others of how to do this journey from slavery to freedom.
And so you see in the first reading, Elijah asking Elisha, “Come, I want you to leave the world you know to a world you don’t know.” Does that sound familiar? God called Abraham. “Leave what you know. Go to what you don’t know.” Called Moses. “Leave who you are and take on a new job.” In every case, he gives them an anointing, empowers them to do it. So if God is giving empowerment to people who are being called to a new life, a new way of seeing things, that obviously means it’s difficult. It’s really hard, and there’s a pull to the old ways if you’re invited to new ways.
I want to tell you a story that may seem strange at first, but listen to it carefully. One of my first memories as a child was in Chicago, and I think I was three years old or something. I moved there when I was very young. I think I was a year old. We lived in, I think, Park Ridge. There was an apartment complex we lived in. It was big, and I remember being outside. And the thing about this building that was unique to me, because well, everything’s unique to a three-year-old. But there was a door and then another door. There was a space between outside and inside, and if you were in that space, you weren’t outside anymore, but you weren’t inside. And I remember — it’s so weird. I remember looking around and saying, “Well, wait a minute. I came inside, but I’m not inside. Where am I? I’m in this space that’s not — it’s not out, and it’s not in.” And I realized that there’s something — there’s a name for that space. It’s called liminality. It’s a liminal space, a threshold, and it means that you’re not where you were, and you’re not yet where you’ll be. And it’s a time of being unsettled, uneasy, uncomfortable. And you’re feeling a pull in two directions, and you don’t know which way to go. Well, that is a perfect example to me of what is happening in these readings when you hear Jesus — first God in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament. “Listen, I’m asking you to come on a journey. I want you to forget about the old stuff and come with me.” “Well, I want to go back to a little bit more of the old.” “No, you let go of the old.” “Well, there’s relationships and ways I’ve been with people.” “No, let that go. Come, and come with me on this journey. But you won’t yet know what that journey is going to involve, and I’ll promise you that what you’re letting go of that’s difficult to let go of is not worth hanging onto if you knew what you are being called to.” That’s the Christian message. That’s the God message, Old Testament, New Testament. You come into this new place.
Well, what is it? What’s it like? All we’re given in this set of readings is two images. One is flesh, and one is spirit. What’s flesh? Flesh is a word used in scripture to describe the world as it is without the infusion of divinity. It is a world that’s self-centered, that tends to be violent, that tends to be self-oriented to the point of self-destruction. It’s filled with shame. It’s filled with anger. It’s filled with fear. It’s the world that we all experience in some way. If you don’t experience that, I don't know where you grew up or how you grew up. But you come into this world, and in some way, that world of the flesh is there. If it’s not there, then you can’t do the work you’re here to do. You have to have an experience with that. That’s why people look back on their histories and their family of origin or their culture and look at things that they received or maybe abuse that they incurred, and they find, “This is so unfair, and why did all this negativity happen to me?” No, no. You have to take that activity as the stuff of your journey from one way of being in the world, the flesh, to being in the world in terms of spirit. So flesh is the negative side of humanity that devours. In the words of Paul, “Stop devouring and biting each other. Stop consuming each other.” That’s the world of the flesh, but there’s only one thing that can describe the world of the spirit. It’s love. If you’re talking about love, you’re talking about freedom, because all love is, is an experience of radical freedom. If there’s anything about being torn apart by negativity and having that negativity move you to acts of negativity, because you’ve experienced it, because you’re ashamed of yourself, and somehow when you have a history of something in you that’s not acceptable, you feel shame. And one of the ways in which shame works in you, it continually bites and eats away at your self-image and your value and your worth. And that’s the world of the flesh. So how do you make this transition? Well, what you do is what Jesus, in that very place between the innocence and enthusiasm of Jesus as a boy teaching the temple people, all that — think of that as when he was free and able to do what he was doing. And then he finds himself in this place where the world is crushing in on him, and he was tempted — he must have been tempted as a human being not to go through this process of having everything that he longed for taken away from him. And he had to have feelings of resentment, but he wouldn’t do that, because he knew that the spirit is not about that but about love and about life.
So the challenge for you and for me is to say, “Yes, I will go on this journey.” And the thing you want to be careful of is watch out for the situations, the organizations, the institutions that somehow feed that negativity of the flesh and tell you that they have power over you and they can demand things from you that you really don’t really want to do, but you have to do them if you’re going to be acceptable, or if you don’t do them, you’ll be condemned and judged and shamed. That world is what you have to know is part of your experience on this earth, and you live with an awareness of it as you move away from it. But the frightening thing is it’s comfortable, because it’s familiar, and it’s clear, black and white. And the other is more etheric and not easy. So we start this journey with Jesus on his liminal walk between these two worlds, and we listen, and we learn that the outcast, the one who’s been hurt, the one who’s been damaged is the one Jesus is most interested in. And that’s the part of all of us that’s been damaged by the law and slavery or whatever it is, and he wants us into the place of freedom. So be with him and me as we walk this journey to get to the place of spirit. It’s where God dwells, and God wants a world that’s beautiful, because he created a beautiful world for you. He wants a world filled with love for other people, because he told us, “That’s the most important thing that I’m giving you is the power to love another person. They are more important than you.” And the last, the spirit, infuses energy in you and a capacity to accomplish this great task, moving in the right direction and finding the goal of the path.
Father, our inheritance is a life of fullness, joy, love, freedom. Help us to feel, when we are robbed of those gifts, that there is something that you are calling us to expose and to work against and that we’re going to be the ones who can be not only freed from the shame and guilt of the world of the flesh but can lead others out of the darkness of that world into your everlasting light. We ask this through Jesus’ name, amen.