Jeremiah 18:1-11, Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17, Philemon 1-21, Luke 14:25-33
These are tough texts, all of them, although they have their logic. In the first reading, from Jeremiah, the metaphor of the potter’s house reasonably illustrates the sovereignty of God together with the freedom of God. God is free to change God’s mind—not capriciously, but in order for God to keep steady on God’s own personal axis of righteousness.
Fair enough, but what troubles us is God reserving the right to plan evil against us. That may logically follow from God being both sovereign and free, and it may honor human responsibility, but how can a loving God plan evil against anyone?
The epistle to Philemon is troubling because of what St. Paul does not say. He does not condemn slavery in general. To get Philemon to take back his slave Onesimus without punishing him and to even give him his freedom, St. Paul bases his appeal on Philemon owing him his faith, not because slavery itself is wrong. This apparent acceptance of slavery by St. Paul has been the instrumental cause of trouble and oppression and evil among Christians beyond all reckoning.
Then, in the Gospel, the Lord Jesus is impossibly unreasonable. He says you have to give up all your possessions. But then won’t you become dependent on someone else who has possessions? Like a Buddhist monk, or even like a slave? The Lord Jesus says you have to hate the members of your family, the parents you were commanded to honor. So do you to abandon your wife and kids and condemn them to begging and poverty? This text could have given cover to the cruel separation of families in the slave markets of America. The separation of families at our border right now is an evil and is supposed to be illegal. So why does the Lord Jesus suggest we do it to ourselves?
You came here today because you are drawn to Jesus as representing a good and loving God, and you want Jesus to make a difference in your life, but when you get close to him, he turns around and talks like this—that you renounce all your substance and your relationships and all that you hold dear.
What you wanted from Jesus was the wisdom to improve your relationships with your family, not to renounce them. What you wanted was guidance on how to handle your possessions ethically, with stewardship and generosity, not just throw them away. He doesn’t even allow for you defending your family and property, because if you’re carrying your cross, you can’t carry a gun. Carrying a cross is what the Romans had designed for slaves, crucifixion was the punishment for slaves, and slaves had no right to bear arms. Is Jesus comparing following him to the social status of slavery?
The Lord Jesus is very much the Biblical prophet here. In Biblical prophecy, the words of the prophet are not meant to be reasonable. The prophet does not offer explanations and does not negotiate. The prophet does not answer your questions, the prophet rather questions everything. No deals are made and no excuses are accepted, no matter how reasonable your particulars may be.
So the words of the Lord Jesus here show no concern for reasoning with us. There’s no deal to be made, no solution, no synthesis. His words break the pottery. He plucks up and breaks down. He clears the ground, ripping out the flowers with the weeds. We want his words to be like a nice summer morning, but he speaks like the hurricane that threatens our security. He means to trouble us.
We will not soften these hard sayings of Our Lord. We will honor their hardness and challenge, like a big rock right in your pathway that you always have to reckon with. Jesus offers you a constant obstacle, a persistent problem that you cannot dispose of. This is a problem you have to live with all your life. You have to keep facing it daily, and examine yourself, even judge yourself. All your good convincing reasons that you need to own this thing, or keep that relationship, or hold on to this arrangement, to all those reasons the Lord Jesus says, “Really?” Time and time again: “Really?”
Don’t bother trying to reason it through with God. God places no value on our affluence. God has no interest in protecting your possessions, or in getting you more of them. That’s not what God does for you. God’s opinion about our possessions is right here in Luke 14.
We have to keep returning to the sober realization that the Christian life will cost you. Especially if you work for justice and righteousness in this world that is biased towards injustice and ungodliness. You might feel like you are losing, not gaining. To accomplish any real change requires you to sacrifice, maybe even your life. This is troubling. A commander of an army has to keep fighting the battle even at the cost of death among his soldiers. During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa I was friends with a black pastor in Soweto, and he told me, “We will be free. It’s up to us. We control it. It just depends how many of us we are willing to let die.” That is troubling.
That’s what Our Lord means by carrying your cross. The cross was not yet the religious symbol of Christianity, but the symbol of Roman oppression and vindictiveness. It was a negative symbol of pain and loss. To carry your cross means that even in the midst of pain and loss you still follow Christ, that you stay faithful to God even in suffering and tragedy. The cost of discipleship.
And yet this is your power. Your freedom and your power. Because, ironically, though Jesus died on a cross he never surrendered. He continued to say exactly what he wanted and did exactly as he willed. In that sense they had no power over him. He was free to the end, though he knew it would cost him. That was his power. So how free do you really want to be, and at what cost?
What if being true to your convictions puts you at odds with your family, especially with your parents? There’s a cost. You take a stand, you get involved in some action, you get involved in some controversial ministry, and you embarrass your relatives and your family accuses you of disloyalty or being inconsiderate.
That’s what Jesus means when he says you have to hate your father and mother: he doesn’t mean the internal emotion, he means the external reputation. If they act all offended at you, that is the cost of discipleship. They may cut you off from their good graces and their sympathy; and that’s when you realize that you are carrying your cross.
Here’s the take-home: How free do you want to be, and what are you willing to pay for it? That is the question you have always to keep before you, it’s never finally resolved. How free do you want to be and at what cost? It’s not so much an obstacle in your daily walk as a stream across your path you have to wade through every day, and you will get wet. How free do you want to be, and at what cost? Following Jesus gives you the pattern and also the hope.
The second feature of Biblical prophecy is that it’s not so much predictive as prescriptive. It’s not an oracle that reveals the predetermined future that we’re locked into and can’t get out of, rather it always offers a moral choice: if you do this, then I will do that, but if you do that, I will do this. The Biblical prophet offers you the challenge and the choice, and the Biblical God responds to you faithfully in honor of the choice you make. Nothing is inevitably predetermined, and the only thing predestined is God’s faithfulness to you.
And everyday the prophecy comes new again, the challenge comes new again, the moral choice is yours again, because God respects your freedom. And thanks to the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, God does not punish you if you fail the choice, it’s only that tomorrow you will be less free, and your right choice will be costlier again.
Most of the Lord Jesus’ parables are most deeply about himself, and what he had to do. He was only describing what he would have to do on our behalf. That he abandoned his parents, that he took no wife and had no children, that he gave up all his possessions, that he gave away his own life upon the Roman cross.
Why did he do this to himself? For us? The atonement? How does that work? There is a mystery here of sacrifice and substitution here, ransom and replacement. This mystery has challenged and troubled theologians through the centuries. All explanations falter because it is finally unreasonable. God does not explain it, God only offers it.
In his loss is your gain, in his bondage is your freedom, in his surrender is your power, so that you gain freedom and you gain power, but that freedom and power is revealed upon the cross as self-giving love, the great unreasonable love of God for all the world and the love of God for you.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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