Every now and then, Jesus says something in such a dramatic way that we know we’re not meant to take it at face value; and that’s what he does in our Gospel today when he suggests that we should hate our parents. (Luke 14:35-33) You can hear and see me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwgfk2LVfv0
What we have to ask therefore is why Jesus makes this extreme statement? My suggestion is that he’s only too aware how much our upbringing, whether happy or sad or something in between, affects us as adults; and he wants to shock us into facing up to this. I know of people who had parents who were endlessly critical of them and generally negative about the world, who now find it incredibly difficult not have the same negative and even suicidal thoughts themselves. But even people who had good kind parents can find themselves trapped in too much love. I’m reminded of St Anthony of Padua, who was brought up in Portugal by his rich, kind and loving parents. It meant that when he decided he wanted to join a Religious Order they paid the local Augustinians to take their son in and teach and train him to be a good and holy and learned member of their community. The problem for St Anthony was that it was all too cosy for him. He found it stifling, with his parents nearby making sure he lived in well-fed comfort. The only thing he could do was make a break for it, not because he didn’t love them, but because he knew that if he was to really follow Jesus, he needed to move out from their loving aura. So he joined the newly formed Franciscans, and left Portugal never to return. Eventually, as most of you know, he became one of the greatest preachers of the 13th Century.
In our Gospel today, Jesus then goes on to say, using the examples of building a tower or fighting a battle, that we need to think out our life very carefully, rather than letting things just happen to us; and we have our 1st Reading (Wisdom 9:13-18) about our need for “Wisdom” to help us here. But a warning! It will only help us if we realise what Christians actually mean by wisdom! For this we need to turn St Paul, not as in our 2nd Reading today, but in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians, where he warns us against the wrong kind of wisdom. He writes “Make no mistake about it: if any one of you thinks of himself as wise, in the ordinary sense of the word, then he must learn to be a fool before he really can be wise. Why? Because the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God”. (1 Cor 3:18) So the question then is, how do we learn what is the wisdom of God rather than the wisdom of the world? Well, first, we need to be wary of any accepted and normal views about life, and especially the views of life that have crept into our thinking via our parents, however good or kind they were.
Think again about St Anthony. Guided by his parents and their ideas, he thought he was following what God wanted him to do; but gradually as he prayed and thought about his life, he began to be more and more uncomfortable with his cosy existence, and had to break out from it. When I was a University Chaplain, I met some students like this. Persuaded by loving parents to take a particular Course, they gradually became aware that it wasn’t right for them. It wasn’t at all easy then to change tack, for parental influence for good or ill is deep within us.
I have met some Christians, mainly online, expressing views that they think are Christian, when I know that Jesus said something quite different; and I wonder if they’ve ever actually listened to the words of Jesus. Last week some people were saying how wrong it was to rejoice over an actor with a reputation as a sinner becoming a Catholic. I was bewildered. Didn’t they know the saying of Jesus that God rejoices more “Over one sinner that repents rather than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” ? (Luke 15:7) Their reply, of course was: “But he’s really got to show he’s sorry!” And I knew that their parents, trying to teach them right from wrong, had often been strict with them as children, and when they tearfully said they were sorry about something, insisted that they proved they were sorry in some way, before they could be forgiven. “That’s it” I thought, “They think God is like their parents!”
I think one of the ways I’ve learnt more of what God’s wisdom is like is by making my Confession. I remember one occasion when I went through the usual list of my failings, and expected my Confessor to pick out one sin that I thought I really needed to work on. I hoped he might say something about it to help me deal with it better. Instead, to my surprise, he picked on something that I’d only mentioned briefly in passing, and hadn’t thought very important. I leant a lesson then about listening a bit more to God, and less to my own presuppositions, probably picked up by my childhood. Listening humbly to what any fellow Christian, not just a Confessor, thinks about us, is surely part of the way we learn to turn from worldly wisdom to the wisdom of God.
Notice too that our Gospel today ends with another hard saying from Jesus, as he tells us to give up our possessions. I think it is St Augustine who helps us here, when he points out that we can give up our possessions not necessarily by giving them away, although that might be right for some people, but by learning not to be possessed, not to be enslaved, by them. And that takes us to our 2nd Reading. (Philemon 9-10.12-17) You see it appears that Paul had persuaded Onesimus to shelve his duties to Philemon and work for him instead; but since Onesimus was a slave, and therefore the ‘property’ of Philemon, one of his possessions, this was actually theft. In the world of that time, Onesimus as a runaway slave should have been executed and Philemon praised for this as a stalwart upholder of Roman property law. But Paul deliberately plays on the fact of his own imprisonment for the faith that he and Philemon and Onesimus shared as Christians, to suggest an alternative to the world’s way of looking at things. The “world” might well think this kind of wisdom just foolishness, but as Christians we always have to beware of just accepting that the conventional way of thinking of things is the way of God, and that often requires us in prayer to think in radically new ways about our life and our preconceived ideas.
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