Thursday, June 27, 2019

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 30, 2019: Please, let me kiss my father and mother goodbye...


Could you leave everything behind for the Lord?

  When, in the First Book of Kings, Elijah throws his cloak over Elisha as a sign that Elisha is to be anointed prophet to succeed Elijah, Elisha’s response can be read as a tad disappointing:  Please, let me kiss my father and mother goodbye, and I will follow you.  Elijah issues a gentle rebuke:  Go back!  But Elisha responds instead by destroying his yoke of oxen and his plowing equipment; he does not kiss his parents goodbye (that we know of), but prepares in the best way he knows how in order to follow Elijah.  For in the end, Elisha knows that the Lord, not land or material possessions of any kind but the Lord alone, is his inheritance (Psalm 16).  By destroying any remnant of his past, Elisha puts his relationship with God and all future fullness of joys in God’s presence before all else.

  Jesus’ call is no less radical.  In Luke’s Gospel, various would-be disciples promise, I will follow you wherever you go, yet they impose conditions:  let me go first and bury my father or let me say farewell to my family at home.  Jesus himself has no home to return to -- the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head – and only the cross to look forward to.  Yet look forward he does.  For if we are to answer God’s call, we can only look forward, not back, as Jesus suggests:  No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.  Jesus’ followers can’t build their identity on what has been; they – and we – must be defined by what he puts before us:  the cross. 

  To be a disciple, to be a follower of Christ, is to know the depth of his love for you and to be changed by that love, so changed as to be willing to leave all else behind to follow him.  This is the freedom of which Paul speaks in his Letter to the Galatians, freedom not to do as we like, but freedom to serve one another through love.  We need to be guided by that love, to live by the Spirit, to love our neighbor as ourselves.  To respond to Jesus’ call, to choose Christ, is to choose love before all else, leaving all else behind, looking forward only, radically altered by the love Christ has for us, a love he expresses most effectively on the cross.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

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