The Hard Sayings of Jesus

Homily preached by the Rev. James La Macchia
Trinity Parish of Newton Centre
September 4, 2022
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 18C
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After hearing our successive readings from the Gospel According to Luke Sunday after Sunday this summer, I’m beginning to understand—for a whole variety of reasons—why the Unitarians just close their doors for the summer season.  It seems as if this summer we have been confronted by the so-called hard-sayings of Jesus nearly every week!  So I will say again this morning what I always say about these “hard-sayings”: All of Jesus’ teachings are hard because life in the corrupted currents of the world we humans have made, and in these very early days of the dawning “kingdom of God,” is hard—even tragic.  Jesus’ “Way” was counter-cultural back then, and it is just as counter-cultural—perhaps even more so—now.  It’s all well and good to celebrate the Incarnation and the Resurrection with great joy on Christmas and Easter, but discipleship day-by-day and week-by-week is not so easy or emotionally gratifying.  Sometimes, as happened to Jesus and to Peter after him, the Gospel “will bring you where you do not wish to go.”  In Jesus’ case, that was an agonizing death by crucifixion on a Roman cross as an abject criminal; in Peter’s case, it was crucifixion upside-down on the imperial city’s Vatican Hill.  It’s become a truism because it is, nonetheless, quite true: Discipleship is very costly and, very often, there is no crown without a cross.  Jesus doesn’t mince his cautionary words when he tells the “great crowd” following him in this morning’s Gospel: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Now, I suspect that more than a few of that swelling crowd took Jesus’ advice in this morning’s Gospel; counted the cost of discipleship; and promptly parted company with him.  Even without the cross, Jesus warns, discipleship will be no cake-walk.  In a Mediterranean culture in which the tribe, clan, and family are everything; in which you often married a first-cousin; and in which a married son and his family lived in his father’s expanding household and labored in the family work, you would indeed have no possessions as the disciple of an itinerant rabbi depending, along with him, on the hospitality and the kindness of strangers.  So Jesus’ admonitions to his would-be disciples in today’s Gospel are an exercise in full-disclosure: Count the cost beforehand and be prepared to prefer Jesus and the “kingdom of God” above absolutely everything else—including parents and family when necessary—if you want to be his disciple.  You are a member of the counter-culture when you become a Christian, and our counter-cultural life will most emphatically not be comfortable or very popular.  It will most likely place us at odds with prevailing opinions and business as usual.  The sacrificial love required of every Christian may even call us to heroic choices and actions at times.

The war raging in eastern Europe right now is a case in point.  For the second time in seventy-five years, Western democracies, with their roots in Christian civilization, are confronted with hard choices in the face of daily war crimes and crimes against humanity eerily reminiscent of the last century’s horrors.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine has plunged the United States of America once again into a great public debate on the issue of war and peace.  Seventy-five years after the close of WWll, the world is confronted again by the specter of a land war of imperial and colonial conquest in Europe—the very eventuality that the current, rules-based international system is intended to consign to the dustbin of history.  As the Iron Curtain of the Cold War threatens to descend on the world once again—this time on an almost completely globalized world of unprecedented interdependency—any lingering doubts about the highly-vaunted “end of history” following the collapse of the Soviet Union are dead.  Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression and the daily and graphic images of undeniable war crimes and crimes against humanity, of almost every description, against Ukrainian soldiers and civilians has laid that chimera to rest once and for all. The Russian scorched-earth method of warfare and terror, deployed now for the fourth time over the last twenty years of Putin’s autocratic rule, replays all of the worst features and crimes of the Nazi wars of aggression.  Fascism is clearly not a thing of the past.  This time, however, the entire grim reality takes place with the real and looming threats of deliberately or accidentally unleashing a nuclear catastrophe on Europe and beyond.  Democracy and authoritarianism are engaged in mortal conflict once again, with ramifications beyond the current Russian war of aggression against an independent and democratic neighboring Ukraine.

The United States, as the preeminent power and de-facto leader of the international community, is once again confronted by a potentially world-shattering decision over an appropriate “humanitarian intervention” to uphold, as a member of the United Nations and its Security Council, our legal and moral “responsibility to protect” civilians from the use of the worst kinds of weapons by the worst sort of tyrants. We all hope and pray to one day live in a world where conflicts among nations about ultimate things will be resolved by diplomacy alone without military actions, but we surely are not living in such a world now.  Clausowitz’s dictum that “war is politics by other means” has never been so painfully and starkly obvious.  In fact, our international systems and institutions—including the United Nations—appear once more to be completely feckless and unequal to the grave challenges of our times.

As Christians and professed disciples of Jesus Christ, we here this morning have the additional burden and responsibility to examine our conscience and to make our decisions according to the counsels of the Gospel.  So, what would Jesus, who is the revelation of the very face of God’s mercy and justice and, for a Christian, the definitive revelation of a human person fully considered, say? What would Jesus—whose life, teachings, “deeds of power,” and Pascal Mystery are the first principles for all Christian virtues, ethics, and morality—have us do in the face of the daily scenes of the indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population of Ukraine; the deliberate targeting of schools, hospitals, countless apartment buildings, and basic civilian infrastructure, including Europe’s largest nuclear power plant? How do we preserve the sanctity of human lives created “in the image and likeness of God” when the Russian leader and his military, supported and abetted by the Russian Orthodox Church and the state, in a completely unprovoked war of aggression, attempt the erasure of an entire people, language, and culture?  How do we best express solidarity and pastoral concern with the suffering innocents in this conflict?  What shape should the love of neighbor and the forgiveness of our enemies take toward the Russian leader whom President Biden has called “a thug” and “a murderer”?  How do we remain faithful to our Christian vocation to be instruments of reconciliation and peace? At the end of yet another sad and sorry episode in human history, will we count ourselves among the victims, the perpetrators, the rescuers, or the bystanders, mindful of Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel’s warning that “The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference”?

Pope John Paul ll once declared that “war is always a tragic defeat for humanity”; Pope Francis, in a recent interview about the war in Ukraine, put it in his characteristic direct and homely way when he said: “War is killing; it is not a minuet.” Nations must always seek conflict resolution through non-violence and disinterested international diplomacy.  War truly is hell, and violence often only begets more violence and always takes its greatest toll on the innocents.  And yet, we still live and make our moral choices in a world dominated by tragedy and the tragic sense of life.  Nations and leaders still place “national interests” above a sincere desire for justice, world peace, the preservation of universal human rights, the rule of law, and the international values and norms upon which civilization depends. We are not yet living in the fullness of the “kingdom of God,” and we are farther from the realization of a “civilization of love” more now than ever before. When diplomacy and the international system fail, through inadequacy or willful obstruction, we cannot ignore our “responsibility to protect” civilians and to prevent the slaughter of innocents.  We cannot escape from freedom and the burden of conscientious choice without a loss of our humanity and our personhood.  We must decide; we must choose as Christians who have embraced the fundamental option for the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our Baptismal Covenant, promising “to uphold the dignity of every human person” (BCP); and we must take responsibility for our hard choice.  And there is no easy or obvious answer to a moral dilemma that will likely shape our world for years and decades to come.  Our toughest moral decisions, after all, are seldom between good and evil; rather, we are obliged to choose among competing goods.

It would be a breach of pastoral trust to say what we might do and how we should act as Christians in these grave circumstances.  And, as a practical matter, such advice would be a fool’s errand as we are—in post-pandemic terminology—living through “unprecedented times” and “uncharted waters” with multiple crises besetting our entire planet at once.  But what I am suggesting this morning that all of us do is to engage the current debates thoughtfully, carefully, and, most importantly, prayerfully; to examine our conscience in the light of the Gospel and as professed disciples of Jesus Christ; to make a personal decision; and to convey that choice to our elected national leaders and decision makers—especially as this war of aggression against Ukraine enters its new phase of a protracted, brutal war of attrition, and as enthusiasm for humanitarian and material support for the self-defense of the people of Ukraine inevitably dissolves into concerns over domestic politics and competing national and political “interests”in the West.  And, above all, I beseech all of us to pray for guidance and discernment for those same leaders.  All citizens of every democracy are responsible and accountable for a choice.  Even doing nothing is itself a momentous choice in these grave circumstances.  As Christians who embrace the Gospel, with its clear values and norms for both individual morality and for social concerns, we have Jesus Christ, who is the “Light of the World,” “the Way and the Truth and the Life,” the “Kingdom of God” in person, to guide us into right paths. Jesus taught, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”  We believe that Jesus is our “Prince of Peace,” who gives “a peace that the world cannot give” and that “surpasses all understanding.” Regrettably, Jesus didn’t leave us specific policy instructions for forging that peace in the dangerous world and unprecedented circumstances of the twenty-first century with its frightening weapons of mass destruction.  He has, however, given us himself in the life of prayer, in the sacraments, and in the nuanced social teachings of the Church.  So, like Mary, who is the very image and reality of both the Church and the individual soul at prayer, we must “ponder these things in the heart” and take our place at the foot of the Cross—along with the Beloved Disciple—and “watch with Christ.” (BCP)  We must listen to our conscience, which is God’s inviolable “still small voice” within us.  As Shakespeare wrote at the harrowing and heart-rending conclusion of the Tragedy of King Lear, “The weight of this sad time we must obey/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” AMEN.

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