If you found today’s readings a bit unsettling, it means
you were paying attention! The readings were unsettling because
they were all about leaving home and that can be unsettling. I’m
not talking about literally leaving home – going off to college or
moving across the country to take a new job. That kind of leaving home
can be exciting. No, it’s the metaphorical leaving home that’s
unsettling: the leaving home that happens whenever we take a step beyond
our comfort zone and risk something new. In that sense, we leave home
when we choose to put an end to an unhealthy relationship, or to heal an
old rift, or when we resolve to get serious about our faith, or to start
a family. You get the idea. In this sense, our lives are full of stories
about leaving home, and so are the scriptures.
The story of the young
Elisha in today’s first reading is a story about leaving home. The great
prophet Elijah had found in Elisha, his near-namesake, a worthy
successor to himself. He came upon the young Elisha who was out plowing
his field behind twelve yoke of oxen and threw his mantle over him to
let him know that God was calling him. Elisha’s response was generous,
but human: “I will follow you,” he told Elijah, “but first let me kiss
my father and mother goodbye.” Elijah agreed, but before long, young
Elisha had slaughtered all twelve oxen and cooked their flesh on a fire
kindled from the wood of his plow. Now that was leaving home!
The call of Elisha sets
the scene for the gospel. Notice how it opened with the words,
“Jesus resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” That’s not
just a casual geographical reference: the journey to Jerusalem is a
major piece of the ‘geography’ of Luke’s gospel. The journey to
Jerusalem is about Jesus’ willingness to leave home in order to embrace
the destiny that awaited him in Jerusalem.
It was while he was on
his way to Jerusalem that Jesus talked to three people about their
leaving home. One runs up to him and rather recklessly claims, “I will
follow you wherever you go!” Jesus’ reply was sobering: “Foxes
have their dens and birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no
place to rest his head.” In other words, following me means not
only leaving home, it may mean having no home at all!
The second encounter
wasn’t much different although Jesus initiated this one. To a would-be
disciple he said those two simple, but oh, so demanding words that once
prompted fishermen to leave their boats and their nets behind. “Follow
me,” he said. But this person wasn’t ready to follow. “Let me go first
and bury my father.” Jesus’ response seems harsh and unfeeling: “Let the
dead bury their dead,” he said. Are we to take those words literally?
No, but we should take them seriously.
The third encounter was
like Elijah’s encounter with Elisha. “I will follow you but first let me
say farewell to my family at home.” And Jesus, giving a nod to the
Elisha story, speaks of putting the hand to the plow and not looking
back.
Three encounters, and
none leaves room for waffling. Leave home, Jesus says. You cannot follow
me unless you leave home.
And where is home, we
ask? What does home mean - for me? That’s a question each of us
must answer, my friends. And there are many possible answers. Is
home my comfortable, but somewhat selfish lifestyle? Is home my
security, my prized possessions, my drive to acquire more and more? Is
home a stagnant or manipulative relationship that is going nowhere and
likely to go nowhere, or is it, perhaps, some old grudges I can’t let go
of? Or could home be my ironclad political convictions that I
tenaciously hold onto with little or no guidance from Catholic moral and
social teaching and its considerable demands? You get the idea. There
are many homes we may need to leave behind in order to truly follow
Jesus.
So, leaving home
is about letting go of personal attachments. But there is another kind
of leaving home, prompted not by choice but by necessity. I’m thinking
of the current situation on our southern border with refugees and
migrants - many of them families with children - fleeing violence and
economic oppression in their homelands, coming here in a desperate
search for a better, safer life. Theirs is a leaving home that carries
with it a moral imperative for all of us.
If we have been
slow to realize this, the stories of young children being separated from
their parents and warehoused in squalid, inhumane conditions – and that
heartrending photograph of the father and his young daughter lying face
down in the waters of the Rio Grande that went viral this past week –
these should have awakened compassion in us and stirred up moral
outrage. They certainly did for me.
They did for Pope
Francis, too who, as you know, has been passionately outspoken about
migrants and asylum seekers. In his recently released message for the
upcoming World Day of Migrants and Refugees, he took an interesting tack
by putting the focus more on us than on migrants and refugees. Here are
a few of his words: “This is not just about migrants: it is about our
humanity. Being compassionate means recognizing the suffering of the
other and taking immediate action to soothe, heal, and save. Being
compassionate means making room for that tenderness which today’s
society so often represses. Opening ourselves to these others does not
lead to impoverishment, but to enrichment because it enables us to be
more human – to understand our life as a gift for others; to see as the
goal, not our own interests, but rather the good of humanity.”
He
went on to speak about meanness and fear of others, of the foreigner.
“Fear,” he said, “deprives us of the desire to encounter the other, the
one who is different from us; fear deprives us of an opportunity to
encounter the Lord himself.”
My friends in
Christ, despite all that keep hearing these days, we must not let fear
carry the day. Love needs to carry the day. St. Paul said as much in
today’s reading from the Letter to the Galatians. “Out of love,” he
said, “place yourselves at one another’s service. The whole Law has
found its fulfillment in this one saying: ‘You shall love your neighbor
as yourself.”
Let me conclude
with a few more words from Pope Francis: “The highest form of love,” he
says, “is the love we show to those unable to reciprocate…. The health
and well-being of our society depends above all on our openness to being
touched and moved by those who had no choice but to leave home and who
knock at our door.”
I warned you at the
start that today’s readings were unsettling!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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