13th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Cycle C

With last week’s solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ we conclude our special post-Easter celebrations as our Sundays return to the cycle of Ordinary Time.  As we join Jesus and his disciples on their travels, we are faced with a hard decision:  What does it take to be a follower of Christ?

The Word for the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time
1 Kings 19-16b, 19-21
Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11
Galatians 5:1, 13-18
Luke 9:51-62

Our first reading from the 1st book of Kings has the great prophet Elijah choosing his successor, Elisha.  The scene from our reading seems fairly straightforward, but to better understand this moment we need to look deeper into the context of this story:  Here Elijah, once again, is a man on the run.  The great drought and famine is over and King Ahab and the people are rejoicing in the Lord.  Unfortunately, that rejoicing included slaughtering all the prophets of Baal (one of the great Canaanite gods).  This infuriated Queen Jezebel who ordered that Elijah should die.  Fearing for his life, Elijah flees to Mount Horab (in the Sinai… some 150 miles south of Jerusalem, the same mountain where Moses was given the 10 Commandments – and don’t for a moment think this is a coincidence).  During his time on the mountain, which the narrative tells us was a 40 day journey (not a coincidence either), the Lord tells Elijah to, among other things, find Elisha and anoint him as a successor (it would seem the Lord is also concerned about Elijah’s life).  This takes us to the moment in our first reading where Elijah finds and commissions Elisha.

The commissioning itself is quite simple, he just places his cloak on him.  Though only a simple act, Elisha is well aware of its meaning.  He knows his life is about to change and asks to bid farewell to his family.  This moment is like a Baptism, dying to our old self so we can rise to our new self.  We become a new creation.  To stress the point of this transformation we have Elisha slaughtering the oxen and instruments he was using to plow the fields.  The fact that he was using 12 oxen indicates he had substantial wealth (not to mention being a strong symbol for representing the 12 tribes of Israel) for normally a field would be plowed with only one or two oxen.  The act of slaughtering the oxen, though seemingly wasteful to our modern eyes, signifies the extent to which he is giving up his former life to take up following the prophet, and Elisha appears to do this with little hesitation, signifying his willingness to follow.  This passage is meant to show us what it means to follow a great prophet – That we must be willing and able leave behind everything in order to venture onto this new path.

Complementing this is our Gospel form Luke.  Jesus and his followers are continuing their journey through Samaria, but when the local townspeople learn that he’s a Jew bound for Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples are turned away.  As Jesus laments that they have no place to stay, still others are coming to him wishing to join their traveling band.  These new would-be followers, however, ask Jesus if they can take some time to get their affairs in order before they join the caravan, but Jesus won’t wait.  He explains that there’s no room for those who need to look back.

Now to our modern ears this reaction from Jesus sounds harsh, but there are a few other things going on that can help explain his attitude.  First consider that this is the ancient world, a culture that moves much slower than it does for us today.  Tending to a father’s burial or bidding farewell to one’s family are not activities that would delay them for a day or two.  This could take weeks or months, and Jesus knows he doesn’t have that kind of time (they are, after all, on their way to Jerusalem).  But there’s also a deeper meaning to what Jesus wants us to teach us:  That in order to follow him we need to leave all our “baggage” behind.  No matter how burdensome or light that may be, we need to let it go.  Why?  I think St. Paul gives us the answer in our second reading:  Freedom.

Our second reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians has him teaching us one of the core messages of this letter:  “For freedom Christ set us free.”  When read quickly this teaching sounds counterintuitive, so we need to slow down and give it some deeper consideration.  There are two levels of freedom at work here.  First, we are we free to follow Christ through the exercise of our free will, but the very act of following Christ leads us to the second:  By leaving our “baggage” behind we are given another level freedom which frees us to focus on living and spreading the Gospel.

Final thoughts:
For many of us today, especially those of us who are more than one generation from having immigrated to where we live today, it can be difficult for us to fully appreciate the “baggage” that our ancient brothers and sisters could carry with them.  Ancient peoples, even those who migrated, were defined by their extended family, their country, their religion, their race, their class, their sex, and just about anything else.  While those differences still exist and still have some bearing on our lives, their affect on us is generally governed not by society, but by how we chose to be bound by these definitions.  We have the freedom to make choices, the freedom to break with the past and make a clean start.  

The same is true for living out our lives as Christians.  We have the freedom to follow the ways and teachings of Christ and his Church, or we have the freedom to walk away.  Unfortunately for the Church many do walk away.  Also unfortunate are those that feel they can have it both ways – following an active life in the Church while also following one’s own desires, which tend to run counter to what Christ has taught us.  We need to leave behind the baggage of our selfishness and turn back to a life of selflessness.  This is the freedom that following Jesus can bring:  The freedom of putting God first.  The freedom to serve one another with love.  We only have to chose to do so.