Unity without victims

In the first sentence of today’s Gospel, Jesus is a popular man.  ‘Large crowds were travelling with him,’ we are told.   What we don’t learn is how many of them were still there, by the time they have heard his challenging words.   For Jesus gives those crowds three conditions for becoming his disciples: hating your entire family and even life itself, carrying your cross (which in his day could mean only one thing: walking towards your own execution), and giving up all your possessions.

Who on earth can manage all three of those?   Would you even want to?  After all, why on earth should you hate your mother and father?  And for those in the crowds who, however startled they may be, are still listening, what are they to make of what Jesus goes on to say about building a tower and failing to complete it, and the warlike king who realises he is outnumbered and quickly sues for peace? 

Let’s take a step back for the context.  Back in chapter nine of Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples about his impending suffering and death, and ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ (9.51)  ‘No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,’ he says. 

So as those crowds walk with Jesus, he is on a costly mission.  He is building something so important, he is prepared to give up even his life for it.   He has sat down with God his Father and estimated the cost.   He knows he will be outnumbered by violent men, but he is not going to send out a delegation in the hope of being spared.   The realisation of the kingdom of God is so vital, so essential, that he will do whatever it takes to achieve it.  In so doing, Jesus will never depart from the way of mercy and compassion, praying forgiveness even for those hammering in the nails.   He will not act out of anything but self-sacrificial love.

What is this kingdom of God, for which Jesus is prepared to give everything?   Jesus proclaims it and lives it and tells stories about it.  It is ‘the reign of God’ when all is as it should be, it is a feast, the finding of the lost, a place where hurts are healed and the oppressed go free.   It is hard to do justice to in words, but the priest poet RS Thomas comes close when he writes: inside the Kingdom, ‘quite different things are going on: Festivals at which the poor man/Is king and the consumptive is healed… and industry is for mending/The bent bones and the minds fractured/By life.’

For me, the description of the Kingdom that speaks most powerfully to our turbulent times comes from the theologian James Alison, who has reflected and prayed long and hard about the endemic violence that threads through human history into our own day.   For him the Kingdom is about a peace and a unity that is victim free.  Unlike so much human creation, the reign of God is not build on the victimisation and defeat of others.   And that description is the clue that opens up for us what Jesus meant in this words about hating parents, and giving up possessions.   Of why these counter-intuitive challenges to ordinary assumptions and ways of life, point to the true cost of building what we are surely all want – a peaceful world with no Gazas, Ukraines or Sudans.   A world where there is no knife crime or frightened asylum seekers cowering in hotels. 

Take love of family.  In his remarkable book Not in God’s Name, former chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs identifies something he calls ‘altruistic evil’.  Human beings, he rightly observes, are social animals, who naturally form groups: and it is this ‘groupishness’ that makes us, and I quote, ‘the curious mixture of good and bad that can lead us to the moral heights or the savage depths.’ (p32)   First amongst the groups we belong to are of course our families, with whom we are deeply bonded.   Most parents would do anything for their children.   But this kind of altruism, that leads us to be prepared to make all kinds of sacrifices for love of others, can also lead us into fear and violence against perceived threats to those we love.  With families, communities, and nations, our ‘us’ is nearly always defined in relation to a ‘them’.  At its worst, the ‘them’ become inhuman monsters to be got rid of or wiped out.   This is what Jonathan Sachs means by ‘altruistic evil’. 

For Jesus, and the Kingdom for which he gives his life, relational bonds, and unity and peace, are never built upon the creation of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.   To refer back to the words of James Alison, the Kingdom is victim free.  So when Jesus tells us to hate our families, he is shocking us into realising that following Him and building the Kingdom of God requires building our lives on a new foundation.   A foundation involving love of enemies, and forgiveness for those causing us suffering.  A foundation where belonging to families and groups may still be affirmed and valued, but not when such loyalties lead to hostility and violence towards others.

For all the deep challenge this offers to our assumptions and practices, ultimately this is the only way to a world without the suffering of Gaza and Ukraine and the more local forms of social breakdown and divisiveness.   Ultimately these so-called ‘hard sayings’ of Jesus are good news, for following him on the way of the cross is the only way to a true peace.

Jesus, after all, knows what it is to be victimised, treated with hostility, and to suffer a violent death.   But out of this terrible experience, in his risen life he returns not with words of revenge, but words of mercy and peace.   He sends out his disciples to live likewise, knowing what the cost might be in building his Church and his Kingdom, a world without victims.  Through this we all have to learn that there is a fundamental difference between a unity based on a shared hatred, and a unity based on penitence for our own complicity in violence.   There are plenty of examples of the former: groups that unite around hostility to others.  The church, however, is called by Christ to be the latter: we find our unity in repenting of our part in the divisiveness of the world, and asking the grace and courage to have our lives shaped by the love revealed in the crucified yet risen Christ.

In the light of what Christ reveals to us, and asks of us, it is shameful that some in our society are now using crosses and ‘Christ is King’ banners to intimidate asylum seekers and refugees.   Whatever the right way forward is, in responding to the really difficult issues surrounding this issue, that governments over many years have failed to resolve, it is not this.

So what of the ‘hard saying’ about giving up possessions?  Although this may not be immediately apparent, this too is linked to constructing a world without victims. 

I know in a new way, via two house clearances following personal bereavements, how the accumulation of ‘stuff’ runs deep in most of us – even when we recognise how problematic this is.  This in a context where pretty much everyone longs to live in a lovely house, and to have the financial resources to achieve a certain lifestyle.   We learn from the earliest age to recognise what that lifestyle should be through those we admire, and models offered to us in a whole variety of ways about what it is be successful.   This is the root of the ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ syndrome, in a context in which our smartphones offer instant access to the apparently wonderful lives of other people.  We learn to want and desire what they have.

Of course it is impossible for everyone to have everything they have been enticed into wanting.   Many in society, especially in times of economic difficulty, feel thwarted; that it is unfair they cannot attain what they want, and frustration and anger accumulates.   In fact this can apply to every one of us, for as is well known, the rich are always other people.  And because of our ‘groupishness’, the loyalty we have to the group we identify with, the easiest people to blame are the outsiders and the oddballs.   This is the root of ‘scapegoating’, the making of yet more victims.

One of the fundamentals of the Christian life is a reshaping of our wants and desires.   We are made, it seems, as creatures of desire, who struggle to be satisfied.  Christ calls us to desire a closer relationship with him, to yearn for the coming of God’s kingdom, to long for a society and a world without victims – and in the Creationtide season, it is worth pointing out that the victims include animals as well as people. War kills animals as well as people; the worldwide loss of biodiversity is shocking.

But the focus of today’s Gospel is people, and families, and possessions, and making plans with the right, Kingdom of God shaped foundations.   Jesus, surrounded by crowds, is uniquely the one who tells them and shows them, and us, how to build a victim free world of peace and unity and love.  I don’t how popular he was by the end of our Gospel reading, but I am deeply thankful for what that reading reveals:  the invitation to walk with Jesus in the way of the cross, with all the joys and sorrows involved.  This is the greatest and most inspiring invitation there is, transcending family bonds and the lure of possessions; the only way to the peace and the unity for which we all long.   AMEN.