2 Kings 2:1-2,6-14, Psalm 77, Gal 5:1,13-25, Luke 9:51-62
I’m thinking about departures—four of them. The departure of John Dyck for Auburn, Alabama, the departure of Karen Bulthuis for Seattle, the departure of Elijah into heaven, and the departure of the Lord Jesus into heaven by way first of Jerusalem. Not that Alabama and Seattle are up there with heaven, but in every case the rest of us are left behind to carry on, disconnected and detached.
Elisha does not want to detach from Elijah, and so he disobeys him every time he’s ordered to stay behind. “Oh no, I will not leave you.” How does he even know? How does Elijah know? I guess it’s a prophet’s business to know such things. Elisha is tested as a prophet—whether he can see the invisible army of the Kingdom of God. That he can see it means that he surely has that double share of Elijah’s spirit—to be the prophet in his place, and to do greater things than Elijah did, even if he is a milder man. The departure of Elijah does not mean the departure of Elijah’s God.
Elijah is the only person in the Old Testament to be taken alive into heaven. Even Moses had to die, on a mountain alone with God, and God buried him. There’s a tradition that Enoch was taken alive, but Genesis does not actually say that. Anyway it was not an Old Testament belief that heaven is our ultimate destiny. So for a man to be taken up into heaven was absurd, or wonderful, or both, and for what purpose? Does he live among the angels, eating angels’ food? The tradition developed that Elijah would return some day, and he would prepare the way for the Messiah.
Elijah is behind our Gospel today. It’s an Elijah story that James and John have in mind when they want to call down fire on the Samaritans, as Elijah had done with the ancestors of these Samaritans. And James and John had just witnessed Elijah on the Mount of the Transfiguration, only 21 verses earlier in this same chapter, talking with Jesus and Moses. St. Luke is specific that what Elijah and Moses talked about with Jesus was his departure, eventually to heaven but by way of Jerusalem. And the final journey of Our Lord to Jerusalem is what he sets out on in our Gospel today.
People want to go with him, like the other prophets with Elijah, but Our Lord brushes them off. With one-liners, with non-sequiturs. Our Lord is being provocative. Off-putting. Unreasonable. If you are plowing, you do have to look back to check your alignment. And it’s impossible for the dead to bury the dead. Not only that, if your father just died, then you should honor your father with an immediate burial. Does Jesus mean that he should break the Fifth Commandment? And, the Son of Man does have places to lay his head, like at the home of Mary and Martha. And finally, no one is fit for the Kingdom of God anyway.
What’s he doing with these non-sequiturs, with this verbal sparring that puts you off-balance? He casts his words like an offensive lineman throwing blocks to let the fullback through, is to clear his way to Jerusalem. He’s like Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon, or more like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge. Our Lord is talking about himself here and the deadly road he’s on—that he will not rest, and not look back, that he leaves his parents to others, and he himself is as good as dead and buried.
He is disconnecting and detaching. He has no enemies and no real allies. He fights no one but challenges everyone. If people oppose him he lets them be, because who can understand him! He must accept his doom, because no one is fit for the Kingdom of God. Yet unfit as you are, because of his death and resurrection and ascension, he gives it to you as a gift.
We do not build the Kingdom of God, despite what well-meaning Christians say. We receive it as a gift. The Kingdom of God does not belong to us. Neither does Jesus belong to us, or to the church. We call ourselves a community of Jesus, and we are, but not that we possess him. On Tuesday morning, as I meditated on these passages, that’s what hit me, and I don’t know if you can call it a take-home, or an application, but I felt the message that the Lord Jesus does not belong to us.
You know that I belong to Melody, my wife, and she belongs to me, and yet profoundly she does not belong to me. It’s only slaves that belong to someone else. Our children belong to us in many ways but finally we have to let them go for their own journeys. Karen has her journey and she does not belong to us, and John has his journey and he does not belong to us. Departures.
We will bless them and set them free from us. Just as the Lord Jesus is free from us and we have to get out of his way sometimes. We have to let him do his awful thing in Jerusalem. We have to let him die, and die alone, without us, detached from us and disconnected.
He must be free of us that he can set us free from the world, the flesh, and the devil—in which we are so thoroughly enmeshed that we could not otherwise be free of it. Call it slavery, or servitude, or merely attachment—it holds us and determines our choices and behaviors. But he detaches us and sets us free.
With this freedom comes uncertainty—so many free choices and options wide open. But freedom can mean chaos and anarchy and then new tyranny. When the Children of Israel were liberated from slavery in Egypt, the Lord God quickly gave them a full set of commandments to keep their liberty in order. It’s a task of all religions to control and limit human behavior. And Christianity has acted like any another religion by putting all kinds of rules on its believers.
Against St. Paul! His strategy is a whole new departure in human social organization. He doesn’t mean it just for the church, he means it for humanity in general. But it’s so radical that the church keeps failing it. He proposes that you channel your freedom not by new rules but by voluntary love, that you channel your social relations by voluntary service to each other, and that you control your own behavior by faithfulness and self-control. He says that against such things there is no law, so that this new way of human behavior is possible within any culture or legal system on the earth.
Human relations in his time were based on the obligations of class and race and ownership. It still is true. His radical departure is to base your relations on the freedom of the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit. I call it the nine-fold test. With all your free choices and all your wide open options, how do you determine what to do? You base your choice on the nine-fold test. Three by three.
Will your choice of action tend toward love and peace and joy? Then go ahead.
Will your social relations exhibit patience and kindness and generosity? Then be my guest.
Will your personal behavior exhibit faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Then knock yourself out.
Experiment. Freely choose.
The church has ever doubted St. Paul at his word, and we keep falling back into legalisms. And yet his radical departure in human social organization has had its slow and simmering influence on global civilization. Just two examples are the liberation of women from property to partners and the liberation of LGBTQ persons to commit to faithful relationships. St. Paul says that if you are led by the Spirit you are not subject to the law. Your guide is not the Law of Nature but the Fruit of the Spirit.
The Gospel is on a long journey in world history like the journey of the Lord Jesus to Jerusalem. The Gospel clears away from its path all other competing connections and attachments, no matter how noble and even reasonable they might be, and all of our laws are judged by the message of the Cross. And where the path is free and clear the Holy Spirit enters in take you along on God’s own journey, and like Elisha you can see the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God does not belong to us but we receive it as a gift. The Lord Jesus does not belong to us but we love him because he first loved us. Karen and John have loved us and they will depart from us and disconnect and detach from us and be free of us. And their freedom is the opportunity for nothing else than love, and may our love for them increase with the length of their journeys until we all come home. We will love them as ourselves.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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