13th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 26 June 2022
One of the most important things we can learn about the gospels is about the nature of the language that the writers use. It is the language of parables – a language, it seems, favoured by Jesus himself. Jesus was a great teacher as we know. He was a great storyteller and he constantly uses stories to communicate his message. But the parables are not simply stories. A parable is very particular kind of story: it is a story that is designed to confuse us, to unsettle us, even in some cases, to shock us. This tendency to confuse, to unsettle, to shock is at the heart of the parables. The point in the confusion is that a parable is designed to bring us to the limit, as it were, of our ordinary way of thinking and to force us to cross over into a new kind of thinking.
In this way a parable is not dissimilar to a Japanese Zen koan, or riddle. In the Zen Buddhist tradition there are some 300 riddles or koans that a disciple must resolve before becoming a master. The very first one of these is quite familiar to us. The disciple is told to go and listen to the sound of one hand clapping. It’s quite clear in this koan that the novice is being invited into a new way of thinking. The ordinary way of thinking doesn’t quite seem adequate enough to resolve the riddle. A new way of thinking is needed. And the novice has to struggle with the riddle until this new way of thinking begins to dawn within him or her.
The parables of the gospel work in very similar fashion. The difficulty that we have with them, I think, is that in many cases they have become all too familiar. The central quality about them has become eroded by time and familiarity.
Whilst Zen Buddhism uses actual riddles to bring the novice into a new consciousness, the storytellers of Jesus’ time, and Jesus himself, use a slightly different ploy. They used the technique of the language of hyperbole or excess. Something is over-stated or exaggerated in order to create a certain confusion in the mind and memory of the hearer so that the underlying point will be remembered. It was an excellent technique in an oral culture although in our own empirical and scientifically based culture it seems quite foreign.
Such is the context though of the gospel today. It is a gospel about the nature of discipleship.
At first, however, it seems entirely unreasonable. The disciple of Jesus, it seems, must be so dedicated that their commitment does not even permit them to bury their own father or to properly farewell their family. One can only imagine the confused looks on those people who first heard this. When we understand the literary genres of the gospels we realise that this, or course, is not be to taken literally. Rather, we see in these sayings this use of the language of excess to express a certain point about the integrity of Christian discipleship.
What do I mean by this term, the “integrity of Christian discipleship?”
The “integrity of Christian discipleship” is formed by those values which are not expendable because they have somehow become rather inconvenient. The commitment to the Kingdom of God does not become something expendable when circumstances render it somehow inconvenient or when it forces us into a more circuitous route through our problems. It is not something that can be quietly shelved in order “to get on with the business of the real world” so to say.
The gospel today is a statement about how our commitment to the Kingdom of God always takes priority – and not only priority, but also becomes the filter in and by which we make all of our choices and decisions – from the personal ones to the public ones. We cannot say, Yes, Lord I will follow you, but wait there is a ‘war on terror’ which we have to fight first before we can practice the values of the Kingdom. We cannot say, Yes, Lord, I will follow you, but wait first there is an election to be won before we can put our discipleship into practice. Just as we cannot say, Yes, Lord, I will follow you but first I have to get my business in order using whatever means I can, before I am free to follow or Yes, Lord, I will follow but first we have to achieve this or that medical breakthrough by whatever means we can. And so on it goes.
The Kingdom becomes the ‘end point,’ the reference point which does not justify means but which is the enddetermining what means we will use whatever we are doing. There is nothing expendable about the values of the Kingdom of God. These values are to impinge on every aspect of our life; they are to interrupt our instinctive responses; they are to pull us up short and have us respond in a different way than how we might instinctively.
It is the integrity between what we profess and how we act that the gospel forces us to consider today. Through the language of access Jesus brings us to new behaviours in abundance.
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