A Straight and Narrow Vision
As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Luke 9:57-62 (NRSV)
Good morning everyone. This story from Luke’s gospel brings up a very particular image for me. I grew up in a small town in Alabama where religion was more or less assumed of everyone, and religious symbols and messages surrounded us. I remember that when I was in middle school, one of the local churches put up a rather disturbing billboard right on the main thoroughfare – right on my way to school, in fact – and it stayed there for over a year. This sign had a rather graphic depiction of Hell: covered with orange and red flames and huddled human forms. Across the top of this grisly scene, in bold print, ran the words, “No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
It was, to say the least, a rather confusing message for me in those years. The sign was obvious and clear in its treatment of what it might mean to be “unfit for the kingdom of God,” but left me hanging with how exactly to decipher the phrase “No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back.” Even if it was rural Alabama, nobody I knew had ever actually used a plow… It was this very dilemma that came back to me as I looked at the reading for today: What does it mean to be fit for the kingdom of God?
We have in our recent heritage a book that addresses this very subject in exhaustive detail: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. This book was written in a time when Bonhoeffer had begun to see the writing on the wall for the Christians in pre-Nazi Germany; when the platitudes and pliability of what he saw as almost a state, or civil, religion were quite open and accepting of manipulation from the power structures of the day.[1] Bonhoeffer saw the church where the people came and mindlessly repeated the Creeds and were weekly absolved of sins they neither understood nor cared to rectify as a church of “cheap grace,” a concept he later unblinkingly equates with “damnation.”[2]
Bonhoeffer addresses our same passage of scripture in the second chapter of his book. For him, fitness for the kingdom stems entirely from the combination of Christ’s calling on our lives and our response to that calling. Let’s look at the story. The first and third would-be disciples in this story both come to Jesus with an offer of their services – they essentially volunteer themselves as disciples. Jesus, in turn, is unfailingly harsh with them. The first he rebuffs by telling him that he has no idea what he is signing up for – that this is not a life of ease and notoriety but one of deprivation and rejection, of homelessness. As Bonhoeffer insightfully points out, this reality is carried forth in our tradition: “[Jesus’s] whole life is summed up in the Apostles’ Creed by the word ‘suffered.’”[3] I checked; he’s right! We go straight from being born of a virgin to “suffered under Pontius Pilate…” What a sobering thought: we worship a man whose very essence is described in the word “suffered.” Bonhoeffer is right to assert that no one can voluntarily rise to such, that no one can have any idea what will be required. The only true qualification for discipleship is a call from the Master himself.[4]
But there is more to it than a call, as we see with the next person in the story. Jesus invites a man to come and follow, and he replies that he is bound by legal obligation to stay and bury his father. “Let the dead bury their own dead…” Now here we have a quite unsettling picture of Jesus as the one who demands our obedience and loyalty above relational ties and obligations. This not our flannel-board Jesus in a pastel pink robe talking here, this is a Jesus who hasn’t shaved in a while and his eyes are looking a little blood-shot because he’s been losing sleep over what he knows is coming. By this time in Luke’s gospel, we’ve already passed the literary point of no return and we have been told in no uncertain terms that Jesus is heading to Jerusalem.[5] You better bet he’s been weighing his options and becoming aware of just how urgent his mission really is. There is no point in soft-peddling the costs of this life to his would-be followers.
This is a bitter pill to swallow, and our two sources – one a first-century Jew looking eye-to-eye with death at the hands of a ruling empire, the other a German theologian watching the rise of the Third Reich – have little if any comfort to offer. Bonhoeffer says,
“At this critical moment nothing on earth, however sacred, must be allowed to come between Jesus and the man he has called – not even the law itself. Now, if never before, the law must be broken for the sake of Jesus; it forfeits all its rights if it acts as a barrier to discipleship. . . . Only the Christ can speak in this fashion. He alone has the last word. . . . This call, this grace, is irresistible.”[6]
Irresistible, he says. Irresistible because Jesus transcends all institutions, because in a time like this, when the very fate of humanity hangs in the balance, when all that stands between the sad, silent triumph of evil over humanity yet again and the defiant, visionary witness of Christ is one man’s reluctance to let his father die without him then by God you’d better throw down your grocery bags and hustle into line with Jesus.
This is indeed a dangerous and scary thing, and it is this very scene, by its misapplication, that has caused the needless break-up of many families. You see, while the call of Christ is not to be taken lightly, it is also not to be assumed lightly, and in our own personal spiritual lives as well as that of our community, our greatest goal must always be that when this clarion call is delivered, (and it will be) we had better be well practiced at listening to and discerning the voice of God. Furthermore, what we learn from this is that our response to Jesus’s call is a vital part of the mix – if we ignore it or make excuses, we are unfit.
And now we come to the third fellow. His bid for discipleship is tinged with a double-minded attitude: he says, “I will follow you, but first let me…” His very offer is self-rebutting; he no sooner commits himself fully to Jesus, than he must begin adding conditions. It seems that the man himself is not even sure what he wants.[7] The problem here is that discipleship is an all-or-nothing proposition – Jesus demands not that we simply add him into our already busy schedule, but that we alter our very lives to a radically different way of being.[8] Our call to follow Jesus is one of absolute renunciation; this is why we say our baptismal rite is the very enactment of death and rebirth. We have been called to an entirely new life and the old one is dead. This is another one of those hard-edged truths of our faith, and that is why our liturgy is so quick to remind us at every turn that this religion business is serious and binding – that we have been grafted into the very body of Christ and swept up into something larger than we can know. It’s tough to remember that all the time, to keep in mind the depth of our collective and individual callings from Jesus.
And now, with Jesus’s reply to this third would-be follower, we’re back to that mysterious billboard: “any man who, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is not fit for the kingdom of God.” It turns out that this was a fairly common proverb of the time, referring to the very important ability of a farm laborer to fix her eyes on an object in the distance and maintain diligent focus in order to plow a straight line. After explaining this in his book on Luke, Charles H. Talbert goes on to say, “only those who can plow a straight furrow by moving toward a mark without looking away for a moment, no matter the distraction, are single-minded enough for a disciple’s role which calls for perseverance to the end.”[9]
And what is that end? See we know the end of the story – we’re so familiar with it that it loses its power – resurrection and ascension, right? Except Jesus and our friend Deitrich aren’t looking at that part of the story right now; they’re focusing on the part that comes first – death. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, any definition of grace that does not take into account that it cost Jesus his very life is a definition of cheap grace.[10] For Jesus – the author and perfecter of our faith – a life of discipleship, a life of being called to follow in his steps, always leads to one place: the cross. It is in our dying daily to self in the practice of our spiritual disciplines and in the sacrificial love that we show to others, as well as in the bigger deaths of rejection, suffering, and martyrdom by the hands of God’s enemies, that we become the body of Christ and transmit God’s atoning grace to the world around us. Death and the cross are the path by which resurrection and new life are brought into the world, and that is the true cost of discipleship. Of course none of us are always ready and willing to pay this cost, it is only by the grace of Christ’s continuous calling on our lives that we are able to aspire to his footsteps, that we are fit for God’s kingdom.
[1] G. Leibholz. ”Memoir,” in The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 29-31.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. R.H. Fuller (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 68.
[3] Bonhoeffer, 60
[4] Bonhoeffer, 60
[5] Luke 9:51
[6] Bonhoeffer, 60-61
[7] Bonhoeffer, 61
[8] Bonhoeffer, 75
[9] Charles H. Talbert, Reading Luke: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Third Gospel. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 118.
[10] Bonhoeffer, 45
Nice. Would love to see that thing you wrote about the Eucharist again, the one I read when we were there!
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