Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 9:28-62 The Transfiguration

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Jesus comes down the mountain, he is not meek and mild.  He seems to chastise a parent whose son is possessed. He rebukes the disciples for wanting to consume the Samaritan village with fire.  Set against this is his kindness to a little child, his refusal to ostracize exorcists who aren’t in the in-group. Finally, he is mournful at the end of the chapter, and unbending towards those who would be his disciples.  This is a section of Luke’s Gospel that challenges our understanding of what religious experience is like, and the ways in which it transforms us.

First, the Transfiguration.  The past is present in this moment, in the persons of Moses and Elijah.  They also stand-in for Jewish identity, for the understanding of God that has been argued about and slowly articulated over thousands of years as the Hebrew people are formed, settle, and strive.  We often think of these two things as the most constitutive of our human nature: the experiences that form us; and, the identities that we’re born into and the identities that we choose. Jesus is in conversation with these two things, yet he refuses to stay with them, even though the disciples urge him to do so.

Instead he comes back down the mountain and immediately encounters a man in the crowd who has a demoniac as a son.  The disciples have failed to exorcise the boy’s demons, even though they’ve recently returned from all the towns and villages where they had no problem casting out demons.  Why are they failing this time? Perhaps it because of their remaining allegiance to the past and to their identities. When Jesus says he will be betrayed into human hands, he’s speaking to this allegiance.  After all, it is those who cling most fervently to the power and prestige that their identities provide who send Jesus to the cross. And it is the experience of insurrection after insurrection that lead the Romans to agree to crucify him.

Then comes the episode with the little child.  The disciples, in their fear, are trying to claim status and prestige.  Jesus confronts them with the child, who has neither status nor prestige.  Children are born into a set of identities, of course, but these identities have to be learned over time, and aren’t as settled with children as with adults.  The experiences that settle such identities haven’t happened yet. And these identities really don’t matter to the work of the Kingdom of God. Non-disciples who cast out demons in Jesus’ name are permitted.  The Samaritans, who reject the work of God because of their own settled identities, are left alone.

Finally, we are left to reflect on what an identity-free life that is uninterested in the past looks like, and what it costs.  It’s a wandering life, more unstable than the lives of foxes or birds. It’s a life where our past relationships really don’t matter that much.  All of this is present in this section, yet I struggle with it, just like the disciples do. I can’t pretend that I’m not a person who is made up of memory, like everyone else.  Can I hold those memories lightly, so that they don’t control me, for good or for ill? It’s dangerous to pretend that I don’t have an identity, that I’m not a white, heterosexual male and privileged in all of the ways that my identity is privileged in our world.  I want to hold my identity lightly as well, but I can only do that after admitting that it exists. Jesus does converse with Moses and Elijah, after all. He just doesn’t stay with them.

Luke 9:1-27 Faith & Discipleship

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Faith is one of the great spiritual themes in Luke’s Gospel, and in this passage the disciples faith is being called upon in three different ways.   First, they are asked to expose themselves to the vulnerability of the indigent and propertyless. “Take nothing for your journey,” they’re told. I’ve known several people who have undertaken similar acts of faith.  A Jesuit who was sent out walking between Minnesota towns, begging from door to door as part of his novitiate. A poet who walked the Camino de Santiago three times, and on the last and longest pilgrimage started from France, walking as his feet swelled and his boots broke, relying on the other pilgrims to hand him the things he needed when he needed them.  Both talked about these journeys as acts of faith, moments when they set aside the communities, possessions, and riches that normally providedfor them and relied on God entirely. But as I honor them for this, I also recognize that this is how a lot of people in the world live every day – without possession or security, and with a different and more profound faith than I am capable of experiencing from my position of relative privilege and wealth.

In a way, the commissioning of the disciples is an embodiment of the beatitudes.  Jesus has told them what the blessed are like, and now he’s inviting them to experience that blessedness.  This is not to make an idol of poverty, but simply to say that there are times in our lives when we might need to experience blessedness as a raw, unvarnished reliance on God.  We don’t often think of blessedness in this way. When asked to name our blessings, we often name our loved ones, some success we’ve had, some security we’ve attained. Can we also name solitude, and even loneliness, as a blessing?  Can we name failure as a blessing? Can we name loss as a blessing? These are the blessings that the disciples are immersed in as they go to bring healing and blessing to others.

It is not surprising that Herod comes back into the narrative at this point.  Herod’s wealth and power is the antithesis to this blessing. In a few chapters we will hear about him again when Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod wants to kill him.  Some Biblical commentators suggest that Jesus sends the apostles out in order to keep Herod from finding him. Herod, after all, doesn’t know what Jesus looks like, so must be confused by reports of twelve Jesus-like figures doing Jesus-like things.  Who to arrest, when one person has become twelve? But at this point, Herod is more curious then threatening. So why doesn’t Jesus want Herod to find him? In a way, Herod is the first of a certain type whom we will meet again in Acts, the person who believes that he can buy the blessing, or that his power and privilege makes blessing his right.  Maybe Jesus isn’t hiding from Herod as much as providing him with twelve more examples of what real blessing, and real faith, looks like. These examples won’t help Herod, or the Herod in us, but a profligate God keeps spreading them like seeds over the landscape.

When the apostles return from their wanderings, they haven’t quite learned the lesson of faith that Jesus was trying to teach them.  The multiplication of the loaves and fishes is a restatement of that lesson, a miracle that reiterates the wisdom in relying completely on God.  It’s a more challenging lesson this time, because the apostles feel responsible for the crowd’s wellbeing, not just for their own. And this is the thing that keeps me, and probably most of us, from experiencing the beatitudes in our lives.  If I had no responsibilities, if I owed nothing to the people I loved, then I might give away all of my possessions and wander as a mendicant from place to place. But I have a spouse and a child, and I owe them something. The apostles feel that they can’t provide for the crowd, but they can at least make sure that the people are provided for in the surrounding towns and villages.  Jesus challenges them, and us, to a faithfulness that might feel very irresponsible.

Finally, he challenges their faith by giving them a glimpse of the end game.  He is going to experience suffering and death, and the disciples and apostles are, eventually, going to experience the same thing.  Can we grow more faithful in the midst of loss? There will be so much more to say about the cross in the days to come, but it looms ever over us, challenging our presumptions and calling us into deeper faith.

 

Luke 8:26-56 – The Way of Light

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Now we arrive at three tales of resurrection, although only one of them is a literal resurrection.  The Christian life may be said to involve two major movements, the via crucis or Way of the Cross and the via lucis or Way of Light.  The via crucis is that depth of despair that is experienced by a man possessed by demons, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, or a man who is watching his beloved daughter die.  We all know our own versions of it – those periods of loss and grief that threaten to overwhelm our individual lives. We also experience the via crucis collectively. Numbers are important in this passage from Luke’s Gospel.  The woman has hemorrhaged for twelve years, Jairus’ daughter is twelve years old, and twelve is, of course, the number of the tribes of Israel. The whole Jewish people is suffering, walking the way of misery and despair. But the gentiles are suffering, too.  The Gerasenes are gentiles, settlers whose city is part of the Decapolis, the league of Greek cities in the region of the Sea of Galilee. They, like the Jews, know what it means to be oppressed by legions, and the five thousand demons that roil around inside the demonaic will not let the people forget their oppression.

Fortunately, we won’t be left walking the way of the cross forever.  In these three stories, Jesus brings each person through their travail and onto the via lucis, the path of resurrection.  Sometimes there’s a cost involved.The Gerasenes aren’t just angry about pigs. They have been oppressed by the Romans for so long that such oppression has become commonplace, easy to hide in the ravings of a lunatic in the cemetery.  When Jesus heals that lunatic, he makes the oppression obvious, even as he sets them from it. But the thing about our oppressions is that they are familiar. We come to accept them, and can even be reassured by them, because the alternative is a step into the unknown. Who are we once we give up the identities that the via crucis has pressed upon us? I might worry that I don’t know how to be someone who no longer grieves. Or that I won’t know how to be sociable, now that the reason for my social exclusion has been taken away. Or that I won’t know how to participate in a just society, when injustice is all that I’ve known.  To be resurrected is to step into a new version of the self, and this is often frightening and confusing.

 

Luke 8:1-25 Being the Good Soil

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Enlight206 2The Parable of the Sower is the first parable in Luke’s Gospel, and includes a handy teaching on the very nature of parables and what we can expect from them in v. 10.  Richard Rohr compares parables to Zen koans. They’re meant to split apart our normal ways of thinking about things and help us see with different eyes and hear with different ears.  Which is why Jesus tells the disciples that the meaning of parables are hidden from most people. In order to truly engage with them, you must be committed to setting aside your current ways of thinking about and doing things, and head off into the numinous but sometimes very frightening unknown.  The disciples, who have given up a great deal to follow Jesus, have already taken the first steps. They contain the good soil that Jesus is talking about, and will allow themselves to be challenged by the rest of the parables as he tells them.

Rohr points out that the Parable of the Sower is about exactly such spiritual readiness:

The seed fell on several different types of soil.  Some just aren’t ready for the Word. They’re not there yet.  It’s not their fault; when the student is ready the teacher will arrive.  Normally we let God in the way we let everything else in. We meet God at our present level of relational maturity: preoccupied, closed, struck, or ready.  Most spiritual work is readying the student. Both soil and soul have to be a bit unsettled and loosened up a bit. As long as we’re too comfortable, too opinionated, too sure we have the whole truth, we’re just rock and thorns.  Anybody throwing us seed is just wasting time.

This is a reversal of how the Parable of the Sower is sometimes read, with the assumption that the good soil is the orthodox soil, all loamy with received wisdom and intellectual obedience.  But there’s a second, shocking parable that’s buried in this section from Luke, one that overthrows many of our orthodox assumptions of a proper Christian life. Jesus’ mother and brothers appear, and he’s told about it with the suggestion that maybe he should help them negotiate their way through the crowd so that they can be by his side.He seems strangely indifferent to helping them, saying that “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Everything we’ve been taught about the central role of family is overthrown. Jesus wants us to extend the love and care we might have for our families to everyone, to break the boundary of family so that we might be more like God.  

Because God, as Ronald Rolheiser points out, is also subverting our expectations in this parable.  God is acting like a foolish, profligate farmer. “Who would waste seed on soil that can never produce a harvest?” Rolheiser asks.  “God, it seems, doesn’t ask that question but simply keeps scattering his seed everywhere, over generously, without calculating whether it is a good investment or not in terms of return.  And, it seems, God has an infinite number of seeds to scatter, perpetually, everywhere. God is prodigious beyond imagination.” This parable, like all the other parables, is meant to jolt us out of any understanding that would limit God’s love to the good or the worthy.  

In fact, our very insistence that God reward our assumed worthiness will make us into bad or rocky soil.  It will destroy our capacity to see and to hear. Again, Jesus shocks us in this remarkable passage when he says “For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.”  He is not talking about material wealth here, but to our capacity to listen, to be plowed up by what we hear so that we can nurture the seeds of divinity when we encounter them. If we resist being unsettled and loosened and turned into good soil, then the religiosity that has gotten us this far will begin to slip away. We will abandon the spiritual life and say that it was doing nothing for us.  But if we accept our discomfort and truly listen with open ears, even knowing that what we hear might change and disrupt us, we will begin to grow, and find our capacity to see and hear expanding day by day.

 

Quotes come from Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs and Ronald Rolheiser’s Wrestling with God

Luke 7:36-50 Forgiveness and Gratitude

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The Weeping Woman by KPB Stevens

Jesus doesn’t condemn people for their sins because everyone has flaws.  Only God is perfect, and while we strive to imitate God (and sometimes even succeed) we remain flawed, temporal beings.  The secret to peace and joy is not getting too upset about it, not punishing ourselves or others for not being perfect, while, obviously, trying to refrain from letting our flaws harm other people.  We need to maintain a certain balance. As T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of “Ash Wednesday”: “Teach us to care and not to care,/Teach us to stand still.”

This is what Jesus’ forgiveness is.  Jesus restores balance in the woman who weeps and wipes his feet with her hair.  So why does Simon the Pharisee take offense at it? Adyashanti explains it well:

The open heart is compassionate because it maintains an essential connection. But as soon as we separate ourselves from another – as soon as we say, “No, there’s nothing in you that corresponds with something in me” as soon as we forget that you and I essentially share the same spiritual essence – then we cut ourselves off, and we go into blame. Forgiveness comes from that deep intuition of our sameness, of our shared humanity. That perception starts to lower the walls of defense, and being judgmental is ultimately a defensive game, a way of staying, “I am not like you.” To forgive is really a way of saying, “I see something in you that’s the same as in me.” Then, even though you may be upset, even though the other person may have caused you pain or harm, when you connect with your shared humanity, there’s forgiveness.

Simon’s response to the woman is essentially defensive.  He wants to separate himself from this woman so that he doesn’t have to consider his own flawed nature. And Jesus doesn’t let him off the hook.  The parable he tells is about two people who both have flaws, and both get healed.

The proper response to forgiveness, as to so much else, is gratitude.  And gratitude is so precious and joyful that God wants us to generate more and more of it.  It is, after all, the thing that will keep us in equilibrium, despite our flaws. Whenever we start to focus too much on our sins, and feel the heat of past embarrassments rush to our cheeks, and become paranoid that other people are judging us for all of our foolishness, the best way to stop this spiraling sense of our own flaws is to start naming the things we’re grateful for.  I often think of my wife, and am amazed that this person, whom I’ve loved for twenty-five years, and who knows all of my manifold flaws and failures, loves me anyway, with a deep, enduring love. That’s the love that Jesus is offering to the weeping woman, and for the rest of her life she will be able to look back on his forgiveness and use it as a wellspring of gratitude. That’s the true power of forgiveness.

 

Quote from Resurrecting Jesus by Adyashanti.  View the book here.