Finding by Losing

- a homily for Pentecost 5 2005

 

Because the Gospel is Good News, it is also Bad News.  It’s free, but it will “cost you not less than everything” as T. S. Eliot says.

 

Henry Ford’s monumentally stupid remark “History is Bunk” was more than compensated for by his other gem, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, which, although bland and puggish, has a kind of warning wisdom in it – be on your guard, look deeper than the surface, distrust anything that does not ask for you.  And this notion of a hidden bait, a deeper and more fatal hook, is sensed clearly in the Gospel reading for today’s mass.

 

If I had a choice, I would not begin the catechesis of one seeking baptism with Jesus’ remarks today.  They are at the centre of his ‘hard sayings’:

-          I do not bring peace but a sword.

-          My words will set people against each other, mother against daughter, son against father, parents against children.  What I say will produce communal betrayals of the deepest kind; treacheries, not of the Shakespearean court, but of the contemporary suburbs.

-          And, by the way, you must lose your life.

 

This side of Jesus never appears in the Hillsong versions of Christianity, and neither does it emerge frequently on the business papers of Anglican synods.  It announces a dangerous and enigmatic Christ who asks us to test the truth of this hard and bitter wisdom in the forum of our experience.  What do I need to sort out in myself, what do I need to discern and re-member for Jesus’ summons to lose my life to become, not a threat, but an invitation?  How seriously do I have to take myself for this to make sense?

 

I once had a goldfish named Caligula who, you will be distressed to learn, died of constipation at an early age.  Caligula did not need to take his experience seriously, not because as you might imagine it was somewhat limited, but because it was endlessly new.  Every circuit of his little bowl was like making the journey for the first time, because his short-term memory was so poor he had no recollection of what had happened three seconds ago – a point, I am sure, that will register with many of us.

 

But, unlike Caligula, we are at the mercy of our experience.  Indeed, our culture gives the impression of one being in full flight from responsibility.  This extends from lack of responsibility for refugees, whom we so cruelly “detain”, to a lack of responsibility towards our own inner statelessness.  It includes a lack of responsibility for the rape of the planet’s beauty and resources to a growing inability to acknowledge our complicity in the world’s violence.  We pretend the aggression is not something we have chosen or opted for, and Christian intercessions sometimes suggest we play no role in the sufferings of others.  Violence “just happens” in appalling places ‘over there’, and whenever we think like this we join Caligula on his happy but appallingly naïve journey in fantasy land.  Prayers that vaguely wish people well are not worth saying.

 

Archbishop Rowan Williams says there are four things by which we can gauge the extent of what he calls our “cultural bereavement”

1. Our inability to repent.  We don’t (because we can’t) say sorry any longer.  In fact, any kind of admission of responsibility is seen as a moral weakness.
2. Our inability to mourn.  We can’t weep because our collective capacity to feel is severely blunted by the sheer quantity of the gratuitous violence we absorb through the cinema, television and even conversation  I am sometimes dismayed that films that would have made me sick thirty years ago now hardly affect me.
3. The loss of that sense of community we call “charity”, a common woundedness that defines the human race as vulnerable.
4. The loss of childhood. We are born knowing.

 

These things, the Archbishop says, plot the extent of our disease.  But the recognition of them also points us towards the places of healing, the admission and embracing of loss that will convert us, not to a private and insular salvation, but to the reclamation of our human dignity and responsibility.

 

There are two themes in today’s readings that bear this out and might be helpful in our reflections.

1. Jeremiah (20:7-13) shapes for us what happens when we opt out of our humanity. The prophet’s vision is almost impossible to read in its honesty and pain.  “I see destruction everywhere”, he says (who doesn’t?), “and its universality and endlessness make God’s promises seem ridiculous.  So I will shut up. I will not mention God, or speak his name any more”.  Translated into contemporary Australian this would read “Nothing to do with me, mate”.  “See yerz”.  “Have a good one” … and other emblems of collective apathy.

 

But once this decision has been made, something else happens, something Jeremiah did not plan.  His bones begin to burn (vs.9).  He senses within himself a desire unimaginably strong, a longing for God and God’s justice that is like a beast rising within him.  His profound sense of loss is, as it were, turned on its head and his emptiness is filled with yearning.

 

This is worth pondering because it suggests that nothing happens unless we tell the truth.  Jeremiah’s realisation of his longing is contingent on his admission of despair and anticipates Jesus’ profoundly subversive remark “The truth will set you free”, an aphorism understood by every tyrannical dictator whose first move is always to censor and control the press.  There is also a passage in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas that bears out this link between telling the truth, painful as it sometimes is, and the awareness of a deeper freedom:

If you bring forth what is within you,

What is within you will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you,

What is within you will destroy you.

 

How many lives have been ruined by the refusal to acknowledge what we deeply want!  We go for the substitute, the imitation, and we call it happiness.

 

2. The Gospel tells us we are to lose our life in order to find it.  This is not a threat but an invitation.  It is not a remark about enduring the necessary losses that life inevitably brings.  It is rather an invitation not to be born along by chance and circumstance.  It is an invitation to choose our deepest desire which is for God alone and to make our choices out of that desire and longing.

The Benedictine monk, Sebastian Moore, defines sin as living through other people, making our choices out of other people’s expectations and an identity that is not truly our own.  By the same token I wonder if, at root, there is only one sin – and that is the desire not to want.  It may be that wanting not to want is the deepest idolatry because it is the refusal to grow into our freedom, the gift God gave us when we left Eden.

 

These are the hard sayings the Church invites us to chew over today – the curious, enigmatic freedom we have when we voluntarily lose our life and the realisation we need to be un-made before we can be re-made.  It is a dangerous Jesus we encounter today, a turner-over of tables, a disturber who wounds us in order to heal.  As Godfrey Rest says:

Home Improvements

You can’t trust anyone these days.

Take this Jesus.

Seemed O.K.

We asked him in,

Just being neighbourly - you know how it is.

 

Over dinner he was polite enough

Apart from a habit of continually turning small

                talk into conversation.

He was even keen to hear about our plans

For home improvements.

So we showed him round.

 

This was the big mistake.

When it came down to it,

He wasn’t interested in the kitchen units,

Or the bathroom tiles;

Or the artificial ceiling in the lounge,

But kept peering into cupboards uninvited

                [as if we had rising damp]

And scrutinising the skirting boards

                [as if we had woodworm]

And prizing up the edges of the carpet

                [as if we had dry rot].

 

Finally he disappeared down into the cellar

                [heaven knows what he found down there]

Emerging with a pick axe

And a drill

And pocketful of drawings.

And smiling in a most alarming way, said,

“I’ve just had a much better idea” ...

and started smashing down the walls.

Roger Sharr