Spontaneity and Calculation
It’s not just the appalling and seemingly impossible demands that Jesus makes in our Gospel; I’m also struck by the strange paradox; on the one hand Jesus encourages us to hate our home and families and take a suicidal road to follow him. On the other he suggests prudence and careful consideration.
The violence is perhaps an exaggerated reaction to those great multitudes that accompanied him. Were they really sincere he asks himself; do they realise what they are letting themselves in for?
The two examples, however, of rational thought and reflection, of building a tower, or rival kings are strangely exotic (neither can have resonated much with the crowd following him). They remind me of the towers San Gimignano in Tuscany or the Mani in the Southern Peloponnese, where family rivalry demanded ever higher towers from which to look down on one’s neighbours. The belligerent king reminds me of the equally futile posturing of dictators with their parades of missiles and tanks and goose-stepping soldiery. Unfortunately history rather suggests that all too often vanity and greed for glory get the upper hand over prudence and reason. Is the point that our moral calculation, our apparent prudence, is so often based on empty pride?
As examples of moral reasoning alone, the stories seem to me to have too easy a point; in fact moral decisions and life changing choices are usually much more complicated, or at least seem so. Although it’s true that after hours or even days and nights of agonising, the right path often becomes plain, even painfully plain, but clear, nevertheless. The crucial question is of course by what yardstick we make our judgements, by what values we decide.
This ambiguous process of moral and life decision making, alternating spontaneity and calculation does, in some ways at least, reflect how we behave; it also seems reflect religious development and the way we come to recognise the salvation we are offered. Jesus own life starts with spontaneous decisions; Mary does not hesitate at the Annunciation (but reflects on it in the Magnificat); the birth in a stable in strange town several days’ journey from home cannot have been planned any more than a flight in to Egypt. The sudden revelation at his baptism is followed by a period of Forty days’ reflection in the wilderness. And his ministry is full of instant decisions, as the disciples are called and very plainly spend no time considering their responses; as the sick or disabled come face to face with Jesus and his blunt but piercing question; what do want? Or, do you want to be healed?
Despite all this spontaneity there is also the sense, that however unplanned and sudden this may seem, it is actually working out a scheme foretold in scripture. And scripture, that is the Old Testament, is largely based on a plan and a covenant. As we heard in the reading from Jeremiah God rewards righteousness and will punish transgression. Despite its reasonableness, Israel again and again fails to keep its side of the covenant, and sometimes has to bear the consequences. But only sometimes; more often God relents and acts as it were with spontaneously irrational generosity and grace. He can’t help, it seems being the loving father he is. And gradually Israel, and the church come to realise that the Law and the Covenant are only the expression and realisation of how we accept that generosity and grace.
As we are shortly to hear some operatic arias, I can’t resist observing that this ambiguous mixture of the spontaneous and dramatic with reasoning and introspection, is very typical of opera, where the action is so often irrational, sudden or unexpected, but the chief dramatic form, the aria, is usually reflective and introspective, if not always very rational- but then falling in and out of love is seldom a based on prudence or reason.
To come back to my sermon, I believe Jesus’ point is that there is a need for both spontaneity and reflection, but most importantly a need to reflect and fix our basic moral values. The tower builder and the belligerent king are calculating, but their principles are wrong. They are reasonable but working on the wrong data; esteem, superiority (literally in height of buildings) and power, military or diplomatic, are not the touchstones for our existence, and nor in the final analysis are family, home, friends and even our own lives, if those lives are underpinned by vanity, envy, pride and the other motivators of tower builders and military monarchs and the like.
We accept, in theory at least, there can be more to life than family, home and so on; and that there are occasions when even our own lives will be less important than an ideal. Happily these are not decisions which anyone sitting in this church is likely to have to take; it is otherwise in other parts of the world. I read recently of a young Pakistani Christian, guarding the church where his family and several hundred others were attending mass. He spotted, challenged and was blown up by a suicide bomber. No time for reasoning there, just spontaneous and incredible bravery. But less dramatically, less drastically and nearer home, we will know of people who have made life changing decisions which while they may not mean abandonment of friends, home or family will certainly have transforming effect on their relations with everything dear to them.
We need spontaneity but it should grow from our recognition of what is truly valuable, a recognition which will, I believe, grow from our acceptance of God’s love and all it implies for us. Recognising that love isn’t always a blinding flash on the way to Damascus. It may grow from habit or from acquaintance with others who express it. But swiftly or slowly, it is spontaneous and ultimately beyond human reason. Amen.