Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 16:19-31 No Better Crucible

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Now that we’re fully convinced of our need for grace and our utter inability to follow Christ without God’s aid, we are given a parable that is not about prayer or the honing of an interior state, but about action, or the lack thereof.  Traditionally this is known as the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Dives being the name of the rich man. He isn’t named in the text, but people have given him the name as they’ve read and retold this parable over millennia. Lazarus should be a familiar name to us.  In the Gospel of John, he is the friend whom Jesus raises from the dead, the brother of Mary and Martha. He both foreshadows Jesus’ own resurrection, and reassures the flawed and failing disciples that resurrection is possible for them. Perhaps this is a different Lazarus, and it was as common a name as Jennifer in Ancient Palestine.  But perhaps it was a name that got mixed in with the oral tradition, and associated with many stories that were all, vaguely, about the same thing. Because in this parable in Luke, Lazarus is resurrected into eternal life, and like all of us who hope for resurrection, his main personality trait is humility.

Encountering this parable, I can’t help see myself in both characters.  I want the humility of Lazarus, while also wanting to maintain the wealth and prominence of Dives.  And I believe that the purpose of the parable is to incite this confrontation within myself. I, like generations of readers, want to be a better, more generous version of Dives.  I don’t want to be Lazarus. I don’t want to be that humble. Or, I want to see Lazarus raised up to a place of comfort and health, while still somehow maintaining his humility. The story makes me want this. It is a crucible where two characters are combined. These two characters are elements of my own soul, and the work of the crucible is to melt them down and make them into something new. The humble person who isn’t in misery.  The person, rich with God, who notices suffering and works to alleviate it.

I borrow this language of crucible from Teresa of Avila, who says, in The Interior Castle, that “there is no better crucible for testing the genuine value of prayer than the effects and the actions that follow it.”  It is true that we cannot work to receive God’s grace and forgiveness, which is pure gift. But we do work, not because we’re trying to earn salvation, but because we are so delighted by the foretaste of salvation that God has given us that we can’t help expressing our joy through love and charity.  Grace is a glimpse through the eyes of God, a moment where we see the world entire, and allow our hearts to be wounded by compassion and healed by joy. Having seen through God’s eyes, disregard of other people becomes impossible. They are as precious and wonderful as we are, and we love them as we are loved.  And because we love them, we work for their good, and share our blessing with them.

 

Luke 16:1-18 Eternal Habitations

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I was sitting with other clergy in a Bible Study, and we were arguing about this passage.  After awhile I became indifferent to the argument, and began to think about the dishonest wealth that I had received in my life.  I took out a sketch book and wrote this poem for my wife:

Eternal Habitations

You are my dishonest wealth.
Close-faced when I met you,
we walked on snow as dry as sand.
I talked about North Africa.
I was so exotic.  You were very quiet.

Later we walked on grass.
I sang “My Funny Valentine” to you.
It was so exotic, this wealth of love.
I was still only half myself.
I lied and said, “I’m this, and this.”
Truth grew thin so I could replace it.

Years later she walked on grass,
our daughter, in blue overalls.
It was so exotic, the sunlight in her hair.
I was aware of how my pretense had allowed
our movement to a house, her birth,
our happiness the gift of how
I’d preened and postured –
on snow, dry as a desert,
on grass, with song, and all along,
we slowly saw through to each other.

I don’t deserve my wife’s love, and she doesn’t deserve mine.  We were so unformed when we met that we could only be dishonest.  We had no truth to tell, yet. We created the truth of ourselves together, the truth of who we were as individuals and the truth of who we are as a couple.   Our love for each other was a kind of grace – more than we deserved, but always there, and always shaping us. Because of our love, I understand the kind of dishonest wealth that Jesus is talking about.  I’ve been the recipient of it.

The wealth we receive from God is always dishonest.  We can do nothing to merit it, we can only accept it.  Once we’ve received it, we need to be faithful with it.  We need to cosset it and protect it and be grateful for it.  This is why Jesus’ seemingly random statement about divorce at the end of this passage makes sense to me.  If I know this dishonest wealth through my marriage, then I need to protect my marriage, to treat it as precious.  And this is true of any of the great, gifted loves. Not everyone is meant for marriage, and not every marriage is a form of dishonest wealth.  Sometimes they’re just dishonest. But when one receives the gift of love, from whatever source, one must be faithful to it. True riches, the riches that only God can give, will follow.

 

Luke 15:11-32 When He Came to Himself

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Starving, grimed with the dirt of the pig sty, the Prodigal Son came to himself. Maybe he hadn’t really believed in himself until that moment – believed that there was a real self, a soul, that was being obscured by all of the needs and wants of his false self. He had been living a life of sin, but not because he was spending his time on women, wine, and gambling. The root of his sin was a kind of atheism about who he was, the belief that he was nothing more than the jangling collection of his wants and desires. As Thomas Merton puts it, “all sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered (New Seeds of Contemplation, 34-35).”  

The moment when he came to himself was a theophany, a moment of encounter with God. It was the moment when he discovered his own soul.Merton, again: “there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God.” This is not merely a story of a person changing his behavior. This is a mystical story, a story of profound transformation, a story in which God is revealed dwelling within the heart of a realized human being.

That is why the story has resonated for so many and for so long. Most people, if they’re honest, know that a change in behavior requires a change in perspective. Only transformed people can live transformed lives. This is why I’ve been so focused on the ego and identity in the last few weeks. Both the ego and identity are defensive masks. We wear them for ourselves as much as for other people. The Prodigal Son is a person unmasked. When you look at him, his soul is all you see. This is why his father is so excited, why he runs to meet this naked and exposed son. God embraces the person who has come to themselves. God, in fact, is already embracing our souls, is intertwined with the human soul in a double helix of love.

The elder brother continues to wear his mask. Unlike his younger brother, his is not a mask of self-license and foolishness. It is the mask of the upright, the person who refuses to acknowledge their own brokenness, the ego that believes that righteousness is enough.  The elder brother has not come to himself.

In order for him to do so, in order for us to do so, we need grace. Merton writes that “although I can know something of God’s existence and nature by my own reason, there is no human and rational way in which I can arrive at that contact, that possession of God, which will be the discovery of Who God really is and of Who I am in God….The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Godself, Alone.”

 

Luke 15:1-10 Being Sought After

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After Jesus calls the disciples to the near-impossibility of leaving behind their families (Jesus says they should hate their families, just to let the toughness sink in), Luke’s Gospel seems to make an abrupt turn. The Pharisees point out that the people who Jesus is hanging out with aren’t rigorous at all in their faith or personal behavior. In fact, they’re so unrigorous that the Pharisees feel perfectly justified in calling them sinners. Jesus responds by flipping the script on what it takes to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. One doesn’t have to have perfectly given up power, control, identity, family, home, or possessions. One only has to begin the long process of conversion that might, in the end and with the help of grace, make one capable of giving up those things.

This is the second great spiritual theme of Luke’s Gospel – conversion and repentance.  Again and again in my life, I find myself falling into the same errors and repenting for the same things. Mostly, I get on my high horse and convince myself that I can become a disciple of Jesus – that I can achieve a saintlike level of calmness and love and feel my heart swell with God’s goodness at every moment, because I have a profound sense of God’s divinity dwelling inside of me. I tell myself these things, and try to be meek, mild, and at peace at the same time, and then I fail miserably at achieving or being any of these things. Distraught, I look with disgust at my own hubris and feel that I’m a worm and no man. And then something reminds me of God’s abundant grace, and I remember humility, and the truth that I can’t do anything, anything at all, without grace.

As I said, I do this again and again and again, an endless cycle of conversion and repentance, and I can only hope that this cycle is wearing a groove in my soul.  That, like a river, it’s slowly eroding the cliff sides of my ego and insecurities. I hope that there is joy in heaven every time that I repent. Still, I’d still rather not go through this cycle time and again. But God is always seeking after me when I go wandering in this way.

 

Luke 14:25-35 Asking for Terms of Peace

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I am not a disciple of Jesus. I have not given up family, and home, and possessions, for his sake. It is important to admit this from the outset, to set aside the hypocrisy and vanity of claiming that I’m something that I’m not. The handful of people who followed Jesus were better at this than I am, but not at first. They must have heard Jesus’ words with the same dismay that I feel. We are to hate our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, our spouses, and even our lives? Really? Wasn’t it enough that they had already left their homes and livelihoods to follow him? Now they had to give up their relationships and die? They fail in this when Jesus goes to the cross, although some of them do, eventually, live lives of radical renunciation.

I am humbled by my own failure at discipleship, but I think that is the point. Teresa of Avila, the great 16th century Spanish mystic, says that humility is the most important attribute and spiritual gift we can have. She goes even further, and talks about God’s humility. Perfect love, divine love, is humble. It doesn’t insist on having its own way. It casts aside the need to control that causes us to fear. As Christians, we hope to mirror that divine love. But we can’t do it on our own. If we fail to see that, if we believe that we can follow Jesus’ harsh command and still somehow imitate perfect love, we are fooling ourselves.

It is the harshness of the command itself that humbles us. Jesus is setting an impossible standard. He himself doesn’t hate his mother, who stays with him at his death, standing at the foot of the cross. And yet he has been willing to give up everything for love. His humble death teaches us how to love like God loves. Beyond the strengths of our social and political power, beyond the boundaries of our identities, there is a love that encompasses everything, and it is our hope to imitate it. But we will be unsuccessful. Like the king in his parable, we will consider the strength of our forces, find them entirely wanting, and be forced to ask God for terms of peace.

In the end, when faced by the impossibility of perfectly imitating divine love, when brought to see each other as we really are, we will be humbled and, in our humility, come to understand our need for God’s grace. The divine love will keep loving us, no matter what our failures, and we will not be able to control it, or direct it. All we can do is give ourselves to it. In humility, we can worry less about being perfect in the practice of love, and let ourselves be sufficient in the acceptance of love.