The closing statement of the reading from Luke’s gospel stands in a similar tradition to those speaking of camels passing through needles’ eyes. None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions’ is, on one hand, totally unambiguous in its intent and, to a certain degree, fairly easy to accept. On the other hand, easy though they may be to accept, at least on one level, it strikes me that Jesus’ words are more difficult to apply. We are forced to ask the question What does he really mean?’
First, it would seem to me that he cannot mean exactly what he says. There is no evidence that his closest followers ever gave up all their possessions. And certainly the Church throughout history has not heeded this command; it is more common for the Church to have had her possessions taken from her than for her to give them up out of a commitment to disciplined poverty.
Ironically, it is the issue of wealth in the form of property which has dominated recent discussions in the Episcopal Church in the United States. As parishes and, in one case, a diocese around the country move to disassociate themselves with the Episcopal Church, the issue of property is the first to surface. Quite apart from theological arguments going before the ecclesiastical courts, the property squabbles have dragged the Church into secular courtrooms across the nation. My clergy colleagues and I in the United States joked that we were a fractured Church held together by a common pension and health benefits plan.
It would be mistaken, however, simply to throw up one’s hands and conclude that Jesus’ words are but another example of extreme and impractical advice to a people far removed from any ability adequately to follow through. And it would be mistaken, certainly, to remove material wealth from a comprehensive approach to Christian discipleship. Our common life as a community gathered together in Christ by his Spirit demands much of us and from us, especially those of us to whom much has been given.
While there is an obvious, and in some cases, strong relationship between stewardship and discipleship, it is clear that today’s passage is located within a substantial discourse on discipleship. Therefore, it corresponds very well to our position within the season of Lent, a time to consider the words which opened the reading: Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.’ It is a time to recall the words of Luther that the whole of the Christian life is semper sub crucis always under the cross.
Lent provides each of us with an opportunity to examine ourselves, our lives, our hopes and dreams, our relationships, everything about us, really and it encourages us to do it deeply, honestly, perhaps even painfully, not because there is any intrinsic value in feeling poorly about ourselves, but in order to see ourselves rightly within the context of God’s grace revealed supremely in him who was made sin for our sake.
Lent moves us to consider who we are as the people of God. Sometimes I suspect that we, as the Church, and as individuals within the Church, lose sight of Jesus’ call to citizenship in his kingdom and discipleship in his world. This call, which demands much of us, is first a call to repentance, perhaps the most important aspect of the life of the disciple, a call to follow his will rather than our own. There is a sense in which Lent calls for a loss of self more so even than the loss of possessions; we’re called to turn away from some of what we are in order to seek after that which God would have us become.
I am reminded of the account from Mark’s Gospel of Jesus calling Levi; no small matter given that Levi would have been an agent of Herod, employed directly by the Romans, setting him at odds with his countrymen and the religious. That story is remarkable in that having been approached by Jesus with the words follow me,’ Mark records very simply that he got up and followed him.’ He left behind his livelihood, his comfort, familiarity, representing the whole of who he was and all that was important to him, in order to give up the old and take on the new, represented in Matthew’s gospel by a change of name from Levi to Matthew. The call of Christ demands from us change.
I fear that the Church in some quarters is in danger of losing sight of this significant dimension of our life in Christ: that which takes us as we are accepts us for who we are, certainly, but moves on onward sometimes with great difficulty in the grace and love of God and often in unplanned directions and into uncharted territory.
The season of Lent provides us with an opportunity to face all that is in need of healing, forgiving, and building up in us, encouraging us to acknowledge our manifold sins and wickedness’ in penitence and faith, but doing so in the presence of the One who calls us to be his disciples.
It’s common to hear that the Church should be semper Reformanda, or always in the process of being reformed, but such encouragement only makes sense when each of us subjects our self to the same demand. The Church is constantly in need of reforming because those of us who constitute the Church are constantly in need of reforming. This reform isn’t merely institutional. It is personal, and it gets at the core of who we are as fallen people; we who too often put ourselves and our wants before the needs of others around us; we who too often seek to impose our will and our wants on God rather than allowing God to have his way with us.
This Lent, let us take encouragement from the One who took no notice of himself, his needs, not even his life, but willingly set them aside for our sake. And let us keep before our eyes the radical claims made on our lives as the people of God, claims which will change us, break us out of former ways of thinking and doing, and draw us closer to the love of God revealed in the suffering and death of his Son. This is, after all, what it means to be a disciple.