13th Sunday Year C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2019

Today’s Gospel passage from Luke’s Gospel brings us to a decisive moment in Jesus’ public life. Before this, he was outlining the dream – the possibilities to be gained if people would choose to listen to his teaching about the merciful God, to think through the practicalities of their relationships with God and each other, and to live together in mutual respect and genuine love. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, people slowly began to resist his message, to hold back from any need to change. Some began to follow him and get to know him better, some actively to contest and challenge him – particularly those already in positions of influence and power. He came to a different insight into the nature of his task. Opposition would harden; inevitably he would suffer. But he continued to trust in the God who captivated and fascinated him. As Luke rather euphemistically wrote: “As the time drew near for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely took the road for Jerusalem.”

Straightaway he encountered resistance. The inhabitants of a Samaritan village where he hoped to lodge the night with his disciples “would not receive him”. The instinctive reaction of James and John was to meet violence with violence. Consistent as ever, Jesus “turned and rebuked them, and they went off to another village”. What would it take for them to hear his message – that to follow his way would mean, counter-intuitively, to meet violence with love?

Right at the start of his reflection on this new phase of discipleship, Luke then chose to make clear to his readers [and eventually to us!] what genuine following of Jesus necessarily entails. He used three similar incidents. Through the first, he immediately laid the cards on the table: “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”. We have heard the passage before, but hearing it today perhaps challenges us to ask ourselves how far are we prepared to go into an unknown future with him? How close, really, do we choose to draw to him? To go the whole way with the experience of discipleship? or to keep our options open and calculate? Do we feel sufficiently drawn to Jesus to allow ourselves to move beyond admiration and even worship to relationship and friendship – whatever the cost?

The second incident would have made clearer sense to Jesus’ [and even Luke’s] contemporaries than to us. It supposed a culture that made a big thing of respecting one’s parents, ostentatiously so – and the imperative to never thereby lose face. Jesus was insisting that to prioritise genuinely following him would inevitably involve counter-culture decisions, and sometimes counter-cultural life-styles. Were followers then prepared to go that far? Are we prepared even to consider going that far? The appeal of remaining in the comfort-zone is tempting.

The third incident, quite similar to the previous one, elicited a further different but significant observation from Jesus. “Once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”. Jesus knew that following him would lead disciples into unfamiliar situations where many would feel insecure. It would mean leaving behind all sense of being in control, and learning instead to trust life, to trust their own judgment, indeed to trust God, and discover how to feel comfortable even in uncertainty. Their temptation would be to “look back”, to not change, to hang on tenaciously to the tried traditions of the past. But, as Jesus would remind them elsewhere, “New wine – new wine-skins!”

A case in point: Will we commit sufficiently to the process of the up-coming Plenary Council to trust the outcomes of the common discernment, and be prepared to embrace them, whatever changes they may ask from us?