At my house on Friday nights we frequently have pizza
and watch a movie. Everybody gets a
couple slices and goes to the living room and takes a place on a couch. And poor Nellie, she just goes this glassy-eyed,
bury-my-face-in-your-plate stare and she starts to walk up to your plate only
to be rudely awakened by “Nellie! Leave
it!” She will snap to for a moment but
you can see in her eyes that she’s about to return to the zone. That’s when we say, “Nellie! Go!”
She gives a look reflecting just how unfair it all is and so we say
“Hurry up!” That’s when she comes out of
the zone and walks around the coffee table only to come back and do it again. The pattern repeats itself until we finally
get frustrated and put her special collar on her, the shock collar. She
suddenly becomes the best puppy in the world and goes and lies down. We don’t even have to turn it on. When she wears the collar, she knows her
place.
The thing is, if it were not for the commands and the
collar she would not be able to stop herself from thieving some pizza. She gets obsessed with what she wants and
believe me, when Nellie’s nose kicks in, the very order of the cosmic universe
of our home is utterly disrupted until she is redirected. To get her to leave behind the things that
her baser instincts draws her to and obsesses her with is like trying to get a
Zombie off brains. So, Nellie must learn
that if she wants to live peacefully in the company of her family, she must
“Leave it!”
Nellie’s inability to get control of herself in
certain situations where her basic instincts are involved may seem a petty
illustration for what’s involved in being a disciple of Jesus but maybe it
rings true. Jesus says that we cannot be
his disciples unless we leave behind everything we have. Other translations use the word “possessions”
in place of “everything you have” so that it reads, “So therefore, none of you
can become my disciples if you do not leave behind all your possessions”. The word in Greek that we’re working with
literally means “the ruled-over things”, the things that we think we have rule
over and yet they rule over us. I like
the word possessions here because of the latent wordplays there such as “Our
possessions will soon enough possess us” or “Our possessions become our
obsessions”.
Thinking about Nellie, when there’s food around her
instincts kick in telling her she’s entitled to it and she loses herself in the
pursuit of them. Let’s say there’s a
steak on the counter. Her scavenger
instincts kick in telling her it would be such pleasure and joy to have that
steak. Everything about her is saying to
that steak, “oh baby, you are mine”, but it’s not hers to have. It belongs to her humans. Nellie cannot possess the steak apart from it
being a grave wrong, but it certainly possesses everything about her to want it.
So I ask, how is this any different from us when it
comes to possessions? As a species on
this planet we have long sought to curb our baser instincts with religion,
morality, civil law, the protection of human rights, education, science, and so
on and guess what, contrary to what the evening news thinks is news, humanity’s
efforts to curb its baser instincts have resulted thus far in a world that is
better to live in than it has ever been.
Even with the looming threats of WMD’s and environmental crisis, as a
species we are safer, healthier, better educated, and more prosperous than we
were even just fifty years ago.
As a species we’ve done well, but when it comes to
the individual of the species—to me, myself, and I—there is a problem. As individuals, we will too often put “me”
before my family and yours. We will put
“my” family before yours. We will put
“people like me” before people different than me. We will make “my” nation great to the
detriment of others. When it comes to us
as individuals, we have a baser instinct towards being self-serving that is
detrimental to the species.
This is why Jesus told the crowd of people following
him that they could not become his disciples unless they leave behind their
possessions, the way he said it was more like “All of y’all cannot become my
disciples unless each one leaves behind his own possessions.” Just as there is no peace at pizza time at
our house until Nellie complies to the “Leave it” command and goes and lies
down, so also there will not be true peace on earth until all are disciples of
Jesus and that won’t happen unless we each are willing to leave behind the things we
think we rule over but really rule over us…our possessions.
Jesus has difficult things here to say about what we must
leave behind if we want to be his disciple.
He begins with our family loyalties.
He says unless we hate our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, spouses,
and children, we cannot be his disciples.
Hate is a much stronger word to our ears than what Jesus means
here. He was not saying we must loathe
our families and seek their harm, which is what hate means to us. Rather, he means we must not let family
members prevent us from being faithful to him.
Commitment to him must come first.
Jesus also says we must hate even our own lives. We must not let our egos or dreams of success
or pride or any of that self-motivation stuff come before him. We must leave our self-identities behind and instead find our identity in him as
his disciples.
Jesus says we must take up our crosses and follow
him. The cross Jesus is talking about
here is not those personal challenges that we all have to bear. The cross was the Rome’s preferred form of
execution for those they saw as enemies of the empire. Being Jesus’ disciples will involve walking a
different walk than simply being good people who are good citizens. As Jesus stood prophetically against the
corrupted political and religious institutions of his day, so also must those
who wish to be his disciples. We can’t
just vote for the candidates that we think are best for me and my family and
think we’re being good disciples. Good
disciples look after the needs of the “least of these”.
Jesus tells a couple of parables about counting the
cost of following him. The first one
involves building a tower for protecting one’s assets. No one builds a tower without making sure they
have enough resources to finish it. It
is foolish to spend everything you have on trying to protect your possessions. In the end, there’s nothing left. But, how many people sell off their dignity
and enslave themselves to have life the way our materialistic and consumeristic
culture says it should be and in the end really have no life at all.
The next parable involves a king counting the cost of
a war. If your army is outnumbered
two-to-one, then there is no point going to war. You will lose everything and there will be a
lot of needless loss of life. It is best
for everybody involved for the king to seek the terms of peace and avoid the
war. Interestingly, the terms of peace
will most likely involve loosing all of one’s possessions anyway, but you will
still have life.
Hidden in this parable is the message that if we want
to have peace, God’s peace which he has given to the world in Christ, then we
cannot also have a lifestyle that is obsessed with and possessed by
possessions. If we want to be Jesus’
disciples, the terms for peace are to walk away from our glassy-eyed, zombetic,
Nellie-esc pursuits of possessing the good life, which is at heart driven by
greed and covetousness, and fall in behind Jesus and take up his simpler, prophetic,
cross-shaped way of life based in denying our selfish sense of self. Put simply, we must “Leave it!” Can we?
Amen.
