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 19th 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 16th Century, Burma in the 19th, 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.
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