“Do
not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you
the kingdom.” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel according to Luke, chapter
12, verse 32.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen
“Do not be afraid, little flock.” When
Jesus first speaks these words, the flock is indeed ‘little.’ The 12th
chapter starts off with a ‘crowd gathered by the thousands.’ Jesus calls them
‘my friends.’ Later in the chapter, just before today’s reading, he is speaking
to his disciples, so presumably he has stopped speaking to the crowd as a
whole, and is addressing the rather smaller group of disciples. They are the
‘little flock’ of the narrative. His message to them, about the certainty of
the Father’s pleasure to give them the kingdom, is meant to reassure them (and
us), to strengthen them (and us), to push aside any anxiety they, and we, may
have about what is happening and the direction that things are going. This is a
promise, and there is no qualification attached to it.
After reassurance like that, it is not
surprising to hear the list of preparations that Jesus gives us. We can
summarize them as: 1. Sell your possessions; 2. Make purses for yourselves; and
3. Be dressed for action. The required preparations have the same sense of
immediacy and lack of ambiguity that the promise has. They have a bracing
quality, a sense of a clearing away of obstacles, a sense of freshness and
alertness and readiness for the next thing which the Father will reveal.
“Sell your possessions, and give alms.”
Whenever I read this text, or hear it, its uncompromising character makes me
nervous. It likely makes a lot of people nervous, and in our materially
prosperous and comfortable time, it may seem remote and irrelevant and
impossible. But there it is, in our text; our Lord does not qualify it, so we
must take it on, and find what we can in it, to help us prepare for the kingdom
which the Father has promised.
“Sell your possessions” means, at the very
least, to be able to let go of anything which holds us back from fully
believing the promise of the Father. Material wealth and poverty alike can be
obstacles to belief. We must see beyond them, beyond their temporary,
transitory character, to the eternal reality, the kingdom, which is our real
destination. Life is short, and our possessions are on loan, and we surrender
them all, we sell them all, in effect, at the end. “Sell your possessions, and
give alms,” means, among many other things, to give what we can, in love, in
care for the poor, the sick, to the least in the world. Furthermore, possessions
and alms are not only money and material things; they are all the desires and talents
and concerns and abilities that we have to use and to give away. We are not to
hoard the gifts which the Father has given us. We may also think of our
possessions as our usual selves, our personalities, strengths, limitations,
every conscious and unconscious thing that makes us who we are. We will, in the
end, let go of all that as well. We will, in other words, sell our possessions
and give alms; or, we will let go of everything that gets between us and the
Father, and we will reveal our true nature.
“Make purses for yourselves that do not
wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven.” Our new purses, evidently, are
possessions which we are supposed to keep in good repair, and we do that by
continually giving away their contents. This is a metaphor for self-emptying, a
steady giving up of everything that can get in the way of the radical freedom
which preparation for the kingdom requires, and which the kingdom makes
possible. “Unfailing treasure in heaven” is our true nature, our nature as we
are meant to be, in the kingdom. We can understand today’s reading as both a
summary of how to reach a glimpse of our true nature, and a description of what
that true nature looks like.
“Be dressed for action and have your lamps
lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding
banquet.” Here we have a sense of immediacy, of alertness and readiness. We are
to be ready, in preparation for the kingdom. Not only is this a requirement for
the kingdom, it also describes what the kingdom is like, again in a picture. Servants
are waiting on their master, and a banquet will begin as soon as they open the
door to him. There is alertness, as it were, on both sides of the door. The
master expects his servants to be attentive and dressed for the occasion, and
the servants expect the master to appear at any moment. The Father appears when
the servants are ready, and the servants are always ready.
But notice what happens next. The master
will “have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” In this
image of the kingdom, the Father does not expect to be waited on. He rather
waits on his servants. In other words, our usual notions about who we are, are
reversed. In the Father’s kingdom, our usual expectations are upended. The
Father has come in through the door, on the same level as his servants, and it
turns out that the servants are the guests of honor. They are ready to accept
this equality with, and perhaps, dare I say it, a kind of superiority to, the
Father, because of their readiness and alertness. Their attentiveness means
that they can see themselves and the Father as they are. This picture of the
banquet in the kingdom is another glimpse of our true nature, and of the nature
of the Father. When the Father comes through the door, reality breaks in, and
we have a glimpse of the kingdom.
Luke makes clear the unexpectedness of
this breaking-in of reality, with his somewhat-out-of-place remark about the
thief breaking in to the house. “If the owner of the house had known at what
hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.”
Clearly, this verse comes from another story, but Luke drops it in here for a
reason. “The owner of the house” is anyone of us, any person really, who would
resist the arrival of the Father. So far, we’ve taken it for granted that the
Father is the owner of the house where the banquet is. But is he? If the
“house” is our ordinary state of mind, our usual way of thinking, our usual
self, hanging on to our possessions, not too interested in treasure in heaven,
not ready to encounter reality, then maybe we don’t think of the Father as the
owner, and we might experience him as a thief, come to take our notions of
ourselves away from us, because we may think that we are nothing else except
our notions. Then we experience the arrival of the Father as a break-in by a
thief. But it need not be so. Luke reminds us that this unexpected arrival is
also that of the Son of Man. When we open the door to the Father, the Son of
Man, our true nature, also arrives. This arrival is always unexpected, and we
must always be ready for it.
Today’s Gospel is about not fearing the
arrival of the kingdom, about being ready for it whenever it arrives, and about
being ready to let go of whatever gets between us and the kingdom. “Do not be
afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the
kingdom.”
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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