Choosing Life in Hard Places

Reverend Sue
18 hours ago
3 min read

“See. I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity …Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors …” (Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Proper 18 (23) Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1:1-21; and Luke 14:25-33.) This choice has often been read as the choice between a good life and a cursed life which is surely a clear-cut choice! But paired with the gospel of Luke it points to a harder choice.

I encourage you to read what I wrote three years ago with reference to the prophet Jeremiah and an exploration of the background of the gospel text.

Belonging

To choose discipleship may not be to choose a “good” or sensible life by conventional standards. The picture Jesus paints is not of an easy life and certainly of few rewards. Indeed, the costs are emphasised. So, what might Jesus have been intending for those listening then and for those listening now.

Jesus had turned his face toward Jerusalem already at this stage of Luke’s gospel and he must have known at least in general terms what was coming. His severe warning of how disturbing discipleship would be may have had a loving intention to it – to sift out those who would not be able bear the cost. And to warn those who were going to choose to follow of what to prepare for. Partly because to choose the one who was to die at the hands of the empire – the rulers of the day – was to choose to be vulnerable to punishment from the mighty. As we know even Jesus’ closest disciples denied him and abandoned him at the end because it was so difficult.

And we might remember that Jesus was also a teacher in the wisdom tradition. Was he also inviting his followers to let go of their attachments to impermanent thing, such as relationships with family, so that they might more fully belong to the numinous and imperishable divine one?

Therefore for those us who hear the challenge today we may need to reflect that while following Jesus is always more costly than we anticipate we are still to count the cost as best we are able – to prepare our hearts and minds for the life of a disciple. A life of disturbance. A life of giving and surrender, of choosing obedience over ease, of choosing to belong with the vulnerable rather than the strong. A life of letting go of what we want to be permanent and yet we know is impermanent: a life of allowing the divine to flow through us and around us and others, until we belong not to the small group of family, tribe and nation but the great belonging of the kingdom of God.

And how is this choosing life? We know that to follow Jesus is to choose real life, to choose life that is truer than suffering and even death, to choose the heart of existence itself, the source of all that is. But it is not a choice that guarantees ease or cheap rewards. Indeed, it almost guarantees being stripped bare of all that is of the small particular life. The only certain reward is of being in communion with the love that pulses through the universe and all life. A love that infused Jesus’ life and teachings and that has animated all that have followed since. A love that initiates us into the truly real kingdom of God which is the family of all that is.

A thread which if followed will lead us through cycles of knowing and unknowing; order, disorder and reorder; building up and tearing down in order to rebuild; of letting go until we belong to no one but to all; being refined until we too are conduits of love, of real life, so that others can also know where life is to be found, so that no-one and no situation is outside the embrace of love.

Even so, come Lord Jesus the Christ, come call us into life beyond the limitations of tribe and transactions. Help us to choose life even in the hard places.