Pentecost 14
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife & children & brothers & sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
It was a Wednesday morning. I can still remember it. It was bright & sunny and the world was at peace with itself, or so it seemed. I had a good morning doing the things a minister gets up to mid-week & it was coming up for lunch time so I had to go & collect Neil from nursery. I was driving through the town & as is my want I put on the radio in the car. I listen to Radio 4 so at first the detail of what was being said was just a little confusing for me. You see, I think of Dunblane as a beautiful wee town with its gorgeous dinky wee cathedral just up from the river as a place where Scottish churches House held some super conferences over my student years and beyond. It is a beautiful spot just as Dunkeld or Aberfeldy or Crieff or any number of attractive wee Scottish towns are. But on that morning it wasn’t. That was the day darkness came down upon that little town & I suspect it has never ever really lifted. It was the day wickedness was visited upon those people in the slaughter of their most vulnerable - the children & I suspect many of that community have never recovered. I listened to the drama unfolding in my car that day & then realised I had to go & still pick up my son because the ordinary mundane trivial things were going on in our wee town as the residents were unaware of what was going on less than fifty miles up the road. I went in & met Neil’s nursery teacher, Linda who said to me Tom, what is up, you’re crying. I was. I was crying & I didn’t realise it because the children that day were our children. Children brought into the world of safety, peace, hope and love all of them the same age as Neil & I couldn’t help it. With tears running down my face I told her what I had heard & she was stunned. Radio is not on in the nursery. Instead they have, just as the gymnasium in Dunblane should have had, the squeals of laughter, excitement & happiness as children go about the business of growing up. We talked quietly, then spoke to the headteacher & some senior staff then I took up my son & went home looking at him, thanking God we lived in Airdrie, thanking God he was safe. I will never forget that day.
This week saw unimaginable horror in a small Russian town whose only error is it is near the border of the region called Chechenya. That town has seen horror like they could never imagine would have been visited upon them & as a consequence a great many have died. Why did they die? The answer is simple because evil took hold of the hearts of people who confused a cause, which may indeed be just, with something that is worth the lives of others. It is hard for me to see how anyone can justify the slaughter of innocent people. Oh, I know many manage. The IRA did it for years, the Palestinians did it on a grand scale as they invented the plane hijack in the 70’s, the militants in many societies do it from red neck so-called American patriot at Oklahoma to religious zealots on the underground system in Tokyo. People justify their inhumanity by drawing parallels with the sins that afflict them & so the world travels down a downward spiral with one group after another destroying each other & then they have the nerve to assassinate moral truth. The children of that school, their teachers & many relatives died because someone, some group loved their cause more than they loved goodness, innocence, beauty & hope. They were able to put themselves & their cause before the lives of the innocent & that to me takes some nerve never mind complete immorality. They were able to justify in their own minds the deaths of those children as somehow being explicable & justifiable because their desire for independence from Russia has to be fulfilled. I fear zealots of any kind, not just the political but the religious variety also because when they put their version of truth before any other we inevitably travel down the road of death, horror & blasphemy as people put themselves before God’s requirement to live in peace.
This passage from Luke’s gospel this morning seems harsh to us. The idea of hating your mother & your father is with very few exceptions to us anathema. We cannot envisage hating our relatives because the family is so important. It is within God’s plan for humanity that we might live in love & security yet here is Jesus suggesting they should hate their relatives if they are truly to be disciples of his. Whatever happened to the fifth commandment about honouring thy father & thy mother? Was Jesus giving us a re-write here? Some have probably misused this passage to draw converts from their families & the security which this so often brings into some group which has deliberately separated people in order to manipulate & abuse them. Most cults operate in this way as they replace the family - the natural unit with the group which seeks to control everything the person does or says. Thru’ the misapplication of this passage some very wicked people have been able to justify some dreadful things. Jesus surely, cannot have meant we should hate our families? In 1939 the Oxford Union debated the motion, “My country right or wrong”. The motion was about just how much the country ranked in the minds of those members of the union & whether they would put it before all else. Given the date, with the ensuing threat of war with Nazi Germany it was an amazing motion. It was all the more amazing in that it was defeated. The students of 60’s America could have defeated the same motion. Some times the family is wrong. Some things are more important than familial bonds, strange as it may seem. Some things are more crucial to the well being of society than our tribal allegiances or passions & it is this Jesus is referring to when he suggests they must hate their families if they are to be true disciples. The conflict between the tribe and God can be terribly harsh. Jesus was telling them that if they are to follow him they must ask themselves can they put God first? For most of us this will never be a problem but for the earliest followers it was undoubtedly so. They would be called out from their relationships to the service of Christ’s kingdom & it might cost them dearly so dearly that they might lose their family. Can they, are they prepared to pay that cost. The same question can be presented today. If it came to a choice between the cause or our families & God’s kingdom would we pick the kingdom or would we retreat to the family corral? For too many the answer is simple. God’s kingdom is compromised by the claims of the family or the cause & so evil prevails in our world. Evil which destroys children for the Chechen tribal cause. Evil which mutilates & destroys because the person did not belong to the group.
Evil has a very subtle knack of looking reasonable & we fall for it all the time. It is right to support the cause when it proclaims our right but sometime the cause demands too much. The Palestinians were right to highlight their situation in the late 60’s & 70’s. The Catholic community in Northern Ireland was discriminated against in housing, employment & so many other areas of life & so their cause was right. The ANC were right in their struggle against apartheid. The Chechen people might have a justifiable cause for independence from that great monolithic beast Russia but when the cause demands the blood of the innocent, the children then they are wrong & we must say so. I do not know the merits or demerits of their cause but I do know that to kill the children is not only horrendous but it is blasphemy against God who created the children in his image. Beslan will now be remembered as a place where the innocents were slaughtered just like Dunblane, just like Sharpeville just like Bethlehem. The slaughter of the innocents continues because evil leads us into thinking our cause, our tribe our family is more important than God’s.
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