23rd Sunday Reflection: The Disguise Of Evil
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – The Disguise Of Evil – 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – (Luke 14:25-33)
A glimpse from the corner of our eye; a furtive glance into the murky mists… only for an instant are we gifted with a prospect of evil. The soul within shudders, repulsed by such revelation. This is not evil as the absence of evil, neither is this spiritual amnesia or spiritual tepidity… this is the raw face of evil that sucks out life, light, and goodness. This is evil that must take on the guise of the good to infect the host.
Nothing in this world is more honoured and more sacred in Judaism, or scripture than a person’s family, the ultimate good. This is the image of God as family, as our first ancestor. Family honour, family respect, and family obedience; this is what defined a person in ancient Israel. To be disowned by your family was the ultimate curse. To have no family was to become a ‘non-person’. The family is seen as a beautiful blueprint of God’s sacred plan showing reciprocal love, care, and support.
Yet there is another side to this ‘ultimate good’, the darker side where evil, manipulation, and oppression hide behind a mask of sacred custom and tradition. For millennia the family has been used as a political tool to build dynasties, secure resources, build alliances, and ensure power. Here also is to be found abuse, subjugation, darkness, and terror.
Jesus’ words today are shocking and provocative. Natural loyalties and accepted morality are turned upside down, making a shocking demonstration that the Kingdom of God represents a new and true family. The Kingdom of God, both now and in the future, redefines family and all that family means.
Loving our enemies and loving our neighbours as ourselves, as impossible as that may seem, appears to be an extension of the great Command of Love, yet in today’s gospel we find Jesus admonishing us to ‘hate’ our closest family, our spouse, and even our own lives, and to say goodbye to all our possessions. We must perhaps also stand with those first disciples and say, ‘this is a hard saying!’
We may not like it, and we may even find other clever interpretations, but we are ultimately reminded that Jesus himself disowned his mother and family. Jesus certainly did ‘walk the talk’!
It might be tempting for us to deconstruct and spiritualize these words of Jesus so that we can have a more comfortable message and a much ‘tamer’ and domesticated God who stands in our ‘winner’s corner’. But here we will find no prosperity cult nor any divine right of a chosen elite. What ‘God with us’ is offering cannot be so easily manipulated, dismissed or declined. In the Divine exchange offered we bring back to God everything, everything that we have been given.
Many people who have had near-death experiences, describe the feeling of first contracting, coming together into a single point, and then rapidly expanding, opening up and becoming bigger, reaching out and touching something that transcends our concept of being, touching the All. This is a mystical re-enactment of our journey towards union with God.
We are born and learn to love in incremental relationships that grow ever bigger, continuously expanding; from mother to father, from parents to grandparents, from siblings to nieces and nephews, from uncles and aunts to our clan, from our clan to our nation; then on to our union with our spouses in a bigger clan and perhaps also another nation. Always expanding the capacity of our hearts.
Our journey reflects God’s process of kenosis, emptying of the self totally for another. And so one by one we are stripped of all relationships; grandparents die, our parents die, we say goodbye to our aunts and uncles, and then even siblings must part before we part from our spouse.
Then that final door through which we all must pass, saying goodbye and leaving behind everything that we have ever clung to, ever held dear, whether family or friend, titles or honours, gifts and possessions, everything! This is the only doorway through which we become united with God and share in that love is limitless, unrestrained, and eternal.
This is the only way to that radical freedom that comes with real Love, opening up the possibility to move beyond that fear that feeds hostility, and beyond the manipulation by evil.
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