Last Sunday
after the 8:00 service, Ralph Tildon came up to me and told me that my sermon
had reminded him of a movie. “We’re No
Angels,” was based on the passage about welcoming the stranger that I had taken
as my text. I don’t expect you’ve ever
heard of the movie either, as it never broke number 8 in the box office listing
when it came out in 1989. But it was a
slow Sunday evening, so Allison and I watched it together.
The movie tells
the story of two bumbling convicts who escaped from a prison and were taken
into a monastery, after being mistaken for famous Biblical scholars. The convicts are played by Sean Penn and
Robert DeNiro, and for me it was worth the cost of the rental to see Robert
DeNiro trotting around in an old fashioned priest’s cassock and biretta. The plot plays out as you would expect when
two semi-illiterate, chain-smoking cons try to pose as holy men in the midst of
a massive manhunt.
The climax
of the film comes when Father Brown, aka Jim the convict, is spontaneously
invited to give the sermon at the monastery’s annual festival. Jim is Sean Penn’s character, a relatively
kind hearted fellow who looks about fourteen.
By this point in the movie, you know to wince when he opens his mouth,
but you’re also on his side.
Jim starts
off the sermon by cribbing lines from a gun advertisement he’s slipped between
the pages of his prayer book. He talks
about how people live in fear, how they need a helper, how so many of the
things we depend on really don’t do much good for us. As the background music swells, Jim’s remarks
build up to this statement.
God good? I don't know.
All I know is something might give you comfort. And maybe you deserve it. If it
comforts you to believe in God, you do it, that's Your business…you want to go
believe in something, well that's not so bad.
And then Jim
steps back from the microphone, and the priests behind him smile, and the
people applaud. Not the finest oratory,
we’re meant to think, but you know, the old boy has made a point.
He’s made,
in fact, the one point about religion that’s supposed to bind all of us
Americans together: “If it comforts you to believe in God, you do it, that’s
your business.” Religious practices and
feelings, whatever they might be, we assume, have a purpose, a recognizable
social good—they help people get through things. Life is tough, and it’s nice to have God on
your side.
A large
crowd was following Jesus, most of them probably just looking for a little
comfort. Jesus was a deeply compassionate and generous person, whose presence
brought joy to so many of those He encountered.
He spoke with wisdom and authority.
Just before this, he had called out a leader of the Pharisees for his hypocrisy
and spoke of the generous welcome God was extending to those so often scorned
or ignored. Jesus also had real power.
He healed people of diseases they had suffered from birth. He cast out demons and raised the dead.
But this day
He wasn’t doing any miracles, and He was much more interested in challenging
than comforting this curious crowd. He
asks them to think about what they really want from him, what they really want
out of life.
The line
that probably sticks out for us is this one: “Whoever comes to me and does not
hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even
life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
Now, in Jesus’ language there weren’t comparative adjectives, so hate
here probably means “love less,” as in the clarifying phrase Jesus used in
another place in the Gospels, “He who loves father or mother more than me
cannot be my disciple.[1]”
So Jesus is
not saying that you should hate your mother or your spouse, but He does mean
that you shouldn’t put them first in your life.
You should not seek in them for the meaning, the joy, the hope that
compels you. Similarly, He is probably
not requiring you give away all your possessions, though some have served Him
by doing this in every age, and the Church’s witness has always been stronger
for it. So, maybe not giving them all away, but not
clinging to them for your security, your sense of dignity.
Jesus asks
the crowd to tally up the things they put first in their life. A man who builds a tower wants to be sure he
has enough to finish it. A king wants to
make sure his army is strong enough to face the opponent before he sets out
into battle. Ask yourself, He’s
saying—is your bank balance really enough to give you what you need out of life? Your job, your set of hobbies, your
friendships, the love in your family—will they provide you with enough to get
by when you must give account for your life; on that day when, as He put it in
another parable, “your soul is required of you?[2]”
Part of what
Jesus is saying here is something that spiritual people have always said—you
can’t take it with you, all good things come to an end. Detachment from worldly things will help you
find the meaning you’ve been seeking.
You’re a spiritual being, seek a spiritual foundation for your
life. There’s nothing particularly
original about this, though it certainly needs to be said. The wise men of the Old Testament said as
much, and there are echoes of this in the teachings of most of the world’s
religions.
It’s that
other thing that Jesus said that would have given his listeners pause—not
hating your mother, but carrying a cross.
We think of the cross as a religious symbol, but to people of Jesus time
it was an obscene horror. Death by
crucifixion was the great unmentionable subject of the ancient world. Though we know it was very common, it’s
almost completely absent from contemporary literature. Even after a Christian emperor outlawed
crucifixion, it was centuries before someone could bring themselves to create a
picture of Jesus suffering on a cross.[3] It was an almost unbelievably gruesome method
of execution, reserved for slaves and rebels.
Jews believed that the crucified were cursed by God, and Romans, by law,
could not be subjected to it.
But of
course, Jesus couldn’t stop talking about crucifixion. In fact, he was headed to Jerusalem to be
crucified, as He seems to be telling anyone who would listen. And here he is, describing the kind of life
he is holding out to His followers, the good life He was sent to reveal to
them, as a crucifixion: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot
be my disciple.” You must come and die
with me—hate your own life--and only then will you be free.
What Jesus
is doing here is calling the whole way we ordinarily think about religion into
question. If all we really needed was a
little more spiritual insight, a little more health, a little comfort to perk
us up when we’re down—well there’d be no need for anyone to be crucified. After all, God had sent wise men before and
prophets who healed. But the problem
goes deeper than that. As Stephen
Westerholm has written in speaking of Jesus’ crucifixion, “so catastrophic a
remedy demands a catastrophic predicament.[4]”
Jesus
doesn’t say it here directly, but the truth is that we’re not doing nearly as
well as we often assume. We are in fact,
under the power of sin. The idea that we
really control our lives is an unfortunate illusion, as our constant inability
to control our desires shows us again and again. Death stands before us, ridiculing all our
aspirations and projects. A deep and
unbridgeable divide separates us from the God who loves us, but whose
unflinching justice demands that we make answer for our sin. “There is never just one transgression,” says
the wise preacher John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, “There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars
when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all.[5]” Count it up, Jesus is saying. How do you reckon yourself on that day when
the books are opened and all stands revealed?
Can you possibly measure up?
None of us can measure up. That’s why don’t just need a comforter, we
need a Redeemer. We need one who will
lay down His life in our place, and then come back from death to bind us to
Himself forever. We don’t just need
wisdom or strength, we need conversion, baptism—to be put to death, the old man
cast behind us, and to be reborn by God’s grace to an entirely new way of
life. We need Jesus as the master of our
life, the One whose guidance we seek in all things, the One on whose grace we
depend. Saint Paul described it
perfectly, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but
Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in
the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.[6]”
Maybe a little comfort was all you really wanted from Jesus today, an assurance
that the Big Guy would give you some help in that life you think you
control. But what Jesus offers is the healing
and renewal of your soul that you really need.
But that’s the life that comes through
taking up the cross, through surrendering control. Only then can we be open to receive the
boundless joy and peace which Jesus shares.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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