God, and God alone, is enough for us – Luke 14:25-3

23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

When most of us hear this gospel reading, I think we’re more shocked by Jesus’ command to hate their family than to take up their cross. And I think that’s because we’ve domesticated the cross. And I’ll get back to what Jesus says about family, but we need to start with the cross.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Fanny Crosby. She was a great Baptist hymn writer, lived in Connecticut in the 19^th Century, she became blind as a child, and, as well as working in rescue missions, she wrote hundreds of hymns that were part of the revival movements and are still sung, including Blessed Assurance, probably her most famous. Anyway, she has a hymn Keep thou my way (which is actually very similar to the Ignatian Suscipe prayer, though I doubt she ever heard that), and the third verse contains these lines: Keep Thou my all, O Lord, hide my life in Thine // O let Thy sacred light o’er my pathway shine // Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I’ll bear; // Hear Thou and grant my prayer, hide my life in Thine. There’s so much that’s profound and beautiful about Crosby’s lyrics, especially her linking her commitment to gladly bear the cross with an invitation to God to keep her all, because she will cling to nothing but the cross (not even life or family). But, the story goes, and it’s such a good story it must be true whether it happened or not, that more than one revival choir had a stuffed animal teddy bear with eyes stitched in to face each other, and called it Gladley, the cross-eyed bear.

Crosby’s commitment, martyr-like commitment, Gladly the cross I’ll bear, became Gladley, the cross-eyed bear, and in that lies, I think, a parable of our taming of the cross. Just as our teddy bear is a harmless version of grizzly, what is our cross that we would not shudder to be told to bear it? What have we made of Jesus’ love if we do not gasp to be told to share it, to love like that?

Perhaps it’s because we think of crucifixion as something that only happened in the long ago past. And, indeed, Jesus’ hearers would very likely have seen many crucifixions. But, the practice didn’t die out with the fall of Rome. It was practiced in Japan in the 16^th Century, Burma in the 19^th, it’s still a legal method of capital punishment in four countries today, though the only documented executions by crucifixion in the last ten years have been extra-judicial killings by ISIL. But what if Jesus had said, live your life with your arm out-stretched, ready for a lethal injection? Gladly the peripheral venous catheter I’d bear?

Think of the vulnerability. And think of the shame. The kind of shame like beginning to build a tower when you know you don’t have enough stuff to build with. Which sounds just like beginning to try to live a life of virtue, of holiness, of love, when we know we aren’t enough, that we can’t pull ourselves up to holiness by our own bootstraps. Of resolving again not to return to that habitual sin even when we don’t think we actually have enough self-control. Of loving the unlovely, the person who know we can’t save, who might well let us down. Of making the unpopular stand in the name of what’s right even though we know what it will cost us. Because we know that don’t have enough to build a tower to heaven, to saintliness. But we dare to begin, and to begin again each time we slip. Because God is enough for us. God alone is enough. As St. Teresa of Ávila put it, solo dios basta. God alone is enough. And because God is enough for us, because God is for us, we dare to begin things we can’t finish. We dare to take risks for love for holiness, because nothing we risk could ever compete with God who will always be there and who urges us on. We dare to be vulnerable, to be wounded, because God heals.

Nothing we rely upon is reliable, not in the way God is. So, everything we rely upon can be sacrificed if love demands it. Keep thou my all, O Lord, as Fanny Crosby wrote. Jesus’ command to hate family would have been just as shocking to its first hearers as to us. But maybe a different kind of shock. It wouldn’t have been heard as being about some kind of emotion, but as a set of actions and commitments. It would be at its heart a statement that we cannot rely on our family, just as we can’t rely on our strength or our possessions, not the way we rely on God. God alone is enough. And God is enough for us. And God is for us.

And we don’t seek out suffering for the sake of suffering. But we know that when we stop clinging to the things we think we can rely on that aren’t God, that’s hard, that’s vulnerable, that sometimes leads to shame, to pain. But when we stop clinging, our hands are open, vulnerable to the world, but open to God’s embrace. We’re open to receive, to receive what’s glorious.