How can we be at once called
to follow and called for freedom?
This Sunday’s readings are about our call to discipleship. During Elijah’s tenure
on Mt. Horeb, God gives the prophet various instructions, including: You
shall anoint Elisha as prophet to succeed you. Shortly thereafter, in 1 Kings, Elijah comes upon Elisha working in the field
and throws his cloak over him as a
sign of his invitation to intimacy with God.
Elisha’s response is not quite immediate: Please,
let me kiss my father and mother goodbye, and I will follow you. Elijah’s response is harsh: Go
back! But Elisha proves his
commitment by slaughtering the oxen and burning their yokes, and follows Elijah
until Elijah ascends to God, leaving Elisha the very cloak that had signaled his
call to discipleship. Psalm 16 is an
affirmation of what Elijah experienced, and what Elisha will be about: deep faith and trust in God, our refuge and counsel, whose faithfulness allows us to know fullness of joys in God’s
presence – the plenitude of
relationship if only we accept our own call.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus also has strong words about the
costs and demands of discipleship. When
those he calls hesitate – Lord, let me go
first and bury my father, or, let me
say farewell to my family – Jesus counters with the imperative of 100%
dedication to the call: now is the time,
so set your hand to the plow and get to work, but don’t look back. Following
Jesus is about letting love drive all that we do, being focused on God, and
allowing the Spirit to grow that love in us.
The more we invest in God’s love, the more we enrich the lives of those
around us with the love that came for
all.
So what does it mean to be called for freedom, as Paul tells the Galatians? The yoke
of slavery references both the constraints of Jewish law and the self-centeredness
of sin. To be called for freedom, then, suggests that, through Jesus, we are freed of both so that we
are free for love, freed for a love
that truly embraces God, both God present in the Eucharist and in other. We too are called to hear God’s whisper, to
accept Jesus’s call to intimacy, to love, and to allow that love to transform us,
and, with the help of the Spirit in us, the world.
This post is based on Fr. Pat's Scripture class.
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