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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