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The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant us, O Lord, we pray thee, to trust in thee with all our heart; seeing that, as thou dost alway resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so thou dost not forsake those who make their boast of thy mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 18)
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Scripture citation(s): Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Luke 14:25-33; Philemon 1-21
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Luke 14:25-33; Philemon 1-21
✛
Family Ties
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I wasn’t able to be with you all last week. I was away, but for what I think of as a very good reason: my brother got married. He got married to a very wonderful young woman whom we all adore, and it was a joyful occasion.
Part of the joy was just in seeing them so happy, their future together so bright, their love for each other so evident. Another part of the joy was in how the whole family gathered to celebrate, people flying into Atlanta, children in tow, from hither and yon. Having scattered to the four winds over the years, we were all re-constituted as a family there for a few days, and it was great.
I was reminded then about how we share something deep with our families in a way that we do not always with other people. Part of it is our own personal histories: cousins I played with as a child in my grandmother’s house; aunts and uncles; nephews and nieces; and those peculiar Southern institutions of third and fourth cousins, great-aunts, people twice removed and all that. When I am together with them, I might not know exactly how we are related, but I know that we are related, somehow, and somehow it has to do with my grandmother and her sister, perhaps. I can’t ever quite follow.
But it is not only personal histories, or even our grandparents’ personal histories, that matter. I share something deep and physical with that group of people: we are blood relatives. Our relationships are marked in our very bodies themselves. I can look at that group of people I have known my whole life and see the physical similarities. And I can see now their children, who are as obviously members of the Daniels family as the noses on their faces. Literally, I can tell because of their noses. I was reminded last weekend that these kinds of family relationships are essential to who we are.
Or are they?
Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. He had set his face to go there and he never turns back—except for here, in our reading from Saint Luke today. He stops and “turns,” Luke says, turns away from Jerusalem and to the crowd. They might have felt that he turned not only to them, but turned on them. And he says, “If you are following me right now, just know that you cannot be my disciple unless you hate your father and your mother; hate your wife, and your children; hate your brothers, and your sisters.” You cannot be my disciple, he says, unless you give up, unless you forsake, everything that you have, your family included.
You cannot be my disciple unless you hate your father, hate your mother, hate your wife and children, hate your brothers and sisters.
Imagine it. It is not impossible that there were members of the same family in that crowd following Jesus itself. They had been following him together. They must have heard Jesus say these words, and then looked at each other, seeing in the other a face that looked not unlike their own, the familiar nose and eyes. You cannot be my disciple unless you hate your family. What went through their minds?
Yes, some in that crowd must have felt like Jesus had turned on them. To a culture obsessed with family lineage and family honor, Jesus told them that all of that was secondary to taking up their cross and following him, and him alone.
This subordination of family ties to a commitment to the reign of God is a common theme in the gospel of Luke (2:49; 8:21). To a people who were almost fully defined by their biological families, to become a disciple of Jesus was not only going to be emotionally difficult, it was also going to be an existential crisis, one that required an alteration of their very identity. They were going to have to give up not only all that they had, but all that they were.
Greek scholars tell us that the verb “hate” here—to hate someone or something—is less a psychological term than a relative one. In the New Testament, hating is not the same thing as loathing, in other words, like we would usually think about it, but a matter of prioritizing, choosing between, loving less than. Not so much an emotional action as a statement of relative value. And of course, reading this, we should also remember that in the first epistle of John the disciple says “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15) and “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar” (4:20). So whatever else today’s reading means, it cannot be simply that Jesus is calling us to hate people, including our families.
Instead, I suggest that the goal here is not to be destructive of families, for its own sake, but to be re-constructive. The goal is not to destroy relationships, but to reconstitute them in a more expansive way.
I say that because that is what we see in the letter that Paul writes to Philemon, which we heard as the epistle this morning. Writing to Philemon, a fellow Christian whom Paul calls his “dearly beloved” and “fellow-laborer,” he commends Onesimus, also a disciple of Jesus Christ, also an evangelist. But he does not just call Onesimus his dearly beloved, or fellow-laborer. Paul refers to Onesimus as his son. Indeed, he says, Onesimus is a son whom he has begotten, using biological terms for this spiritual relationship, this bond they have in Christ. Paul entreats Philemon to receive Onesimus not only as a friend, but as his brother. Again biological and familial terms are being used for a spiritual relationship in Christ, constituting this new family.
So we see here a re-composition of family relationships. Onesimus is a brother who does not share the same biological father. More importantly, he is a brother in Christ, knit together in the family of those called apart to call upon Jesus as their lord.
But there is more still, because Onesimus is a slave. He is not a metaphorical slave like Paul, when he says that he himself is a “slave to Christ,” but an honest to God literal slave in a culture that incorporated that odious practice. The brother that the wealthy Philemon is being asked to take on is not a fellow aristocrat, but a slave. This otherwise essential difference between them disappears in the kingdom of God. The barrier simply dissolves.
This is a theme of St. Paul, repeated in the epistles to the Galatians and to the Colossians. To the former he writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:27). To the latter: “There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all” (3:11). There is one family, he says, and it is not determined by class, nor by nationality, nor by biology. There is one family in Christ who is all, and in all.
Note this: he says, there is neither Jew nor Greek. Not “there will be neither.” Not “one day there will be neither.” Not only in the future, in other words, but now, in the present day, Paul says, those distinctions have been erased by the Christ who is all and in all.
This means that every face we look into is the face of our sister or brother, whatever their noses are like, or the color of their eyes. Every person is a brother or sister whom Christ died to save. In that important sense, we all are blood relations. But the blood is not ours, passed down from generations. The blood that we have in common is the blood of Jesus, spilled on the cross, and given in the Eucharist. That is the blood that matters. The relationship between us is not marked primarily in our bodies; our relationship is marked on his body, the crucified body that was the culmination of that trip to Jerusalem.
Of course, there is a sense in which we already know some of that. Because even there at my brother’s joyful wedding, surrounded by family, we did not, in fact, all share the same blood. Several of us there were children of different marriages; a few of us were adopted; others of us were uncles and aunts even though we were not biological brothers and sisters of anybody in attendance. It was not, in fact, our blood that bound us together, but something much deeper.
That is what happens, throughout all creation, because of the outstretched arms of Jesus, who receives all of his sisters and brothers as children of the heavenly Father. The seeming privilege of the biological family, of the social class, of the race, is deconstructed by Jesus so that it can be re-constructed by him, in love. The old order is broken in Jesus, there on the cross, so that it can be redeemed. Because of Jesus, we Gentiles are all adopted, brought into relationship with God through the blood of Jesus, so that we all can be together at another wedding, that great marriage feast in the New Jerusalem, the joyful heavenly banquet. And there the slaves will sit down at the table next to those born free; and enemies will become friends; and the true family, which is all the children of God, will give thanks.
