“No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to see what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.”
How many of us have been planning for a trip, perhaps a 3 or 4 day cruise, and when the time came to pack, we threw in clothes we knew we’d need, clothes that we might need, clothes that would be nice to have if a specific event occurred and extra things just in case something happened to the other clothes that we had packed? By the time that we were done, we may have found that we had 2 or 3 large suitcases for a 4 day journey! Then, on arrival on the ship, we come to find out that the cabin is about ½ the size that we were expecting and we’re stuck with all of this excess baggage and not much room to move around.
In this case, not only have we over packed (which I am guilty of regularly… just ask my wife) but we’ve taken up the space that we could have used to move around the cabin easily, and probably paid extra luggage fees on the plane to boot!
Our readings today deal with the excess baggage that we all carry around with us when we try to follow Christ. How many of us have used excuses like, “I would join the choir, but I need time to take care of my elderly parents,” or “The deacon program sounds good, but I don’t have enough time for my family as it is,” or “I really feel like I should ask my neighbor to come with me to church, but they might think I weird.”
As a disclaimer, I have personally used excuses like these at various times in my life. On the surface, they make sense to us. They seem to be pointing to right priorities, taking care of others, not wanting to offend people. However, this is not what Christ is calling us to do. In both cases, Elisha and the unnamed people in the Gospel had the same priorities, but Christ challenged those priorities. Sometimes our priorities are our baggage. They get in the way of our following Christ. The extra suitcases block us from our journey to him.
What all of us fail to see many times is that when we take seriously Christ’s call to ‘lose our lives to Him,’ as we heard last week, we are not abandoning our responsibilities. We are actually correctly prioritizing our lives. To follow Christ completely—without regard for our families, friends, etc… -- seems like an utterly irresponsible thing to do. We may cringe when the person who wants to bury their parents is told to leave them and “let the dead bury their dead.” However, to live in Christ is to live in complete freedom. To live in Christ is to trust that He will take care of those things in our baggage. To live in Christ is, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, to be free and not under the law.
Make no mistake about it, St. Paul is not telling us that living in the Spirit is a license to lawlessness. What he is saying is that when we totally, truly have given ourselves up to God, the Holy Spirit gives us the grace, wisdom, counsel and courage to desire to please God in all that we do. When Christ speaks of abandoning family members, not only here but in other places in the Gospels as well, what He is saying is that many people are not in a position to understand that when Christ is our first priority, we not only believe but know that God will take care of everything that we can’t while we are following Him. This will cause many to abandon US. A frightening prospect, but most of the time, this is for the short term as our witness to the radical love of Christ… the radical love of the One God… eventually proves irresistible and many times they will follow along once they see that they too have too much baggage.
So, as we go forth through our week ahead, let’s try to drop some of our excess baggage so that we can more easily prioritize our lives with Christ as the head and journey with Him towards both earthly and eternal happiness.
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