13th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C)
1 Kings 19:16,19-21 | Psalm 15(16):1-2,5,7-11 | Galatians 5:1,13-18 | Luke 9:51-62
Another to whom he said, ‘Follow me’, replied, ‘Let me go and bury my father first.’ But he answered, ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead; your duty is to go and spread the news of the kingdom of God.’
Luke 9:59-60
Over the years, I’d always assumed that the disciple-to-be was waiting for his father to pass, then he’d offer a quick funeral and then join Jesus. Either that, or he was about to send his father off, and needed a day’s “leave”.
Then I read Burial Practices in First Century Palestine, and my understanding changed completely. Now, I see a man grieving his just-departed father, telling Jesus that he needed to wait years for his father’s body to decompose, so that he can remove the bones from the family tomb and inter them in an ossuary. (We Singaporeans do much the same thing, just sped up with fire.) Jesus in turn tells him to delegate the hideously-long process to someone else, and follow Him NOW.
This Bible passage is now much more relatable. If anyone accepts a position, but asks their employer to wait for a few years before actually starting work…well, they’d be out of a job right there and then. “Thick-skinned” is probably the mildest reaction one could expect.
All this flashed through my mind as I held the hand of a dear friend, now spending her days in a hospice. I remembered all the years she spent spreading joy to the many people she met, starting each day in communion with the God we both love. In a very real way, she embodied the New Commandment that Jesus Himself gave us: Love one another as I have loved you. The crowds of visitors she receives each day testifies to the love that she shared, “rebounding” back on her.
And it became very clear what today’s Gospel message is: Follow Me NOW, for you have no say on when, where and how your life will end. God will call us home on His schedule, not ours. It’s pure folly to defer our Christian duty to love and proclaim the Good News, till our retirement or some other convenient time of our choosing. If we “have no time” now, we may well end up suddenly dying in an accident or other calamity, meeting our Creator with nothing to show for the faith we claim.
Even if our lives didn’t come to an abrupt end, it’s also silly to assume that we’d have the faculties to do our Christian duty in the little time left to us. I’ve seen too many people whose minds went early (stroke patients), and though I always pray that God will grant me the continued ability to literally sing His praises till my dying day, I know that this isn’t my decision to make.
Dear friends, when we “signed on” as Catholics, our duties started right there and then. Putting them off for years on end, so that we can do life My Way, is exactly like telling your boss, “wait hor, I’ll get around to it in a few decades…maybe”.
Even if we have the purest of intentions, and are simply delaying our apostolizing to a more comfortable point in time, we may well find ourselves the subject of Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem, mere shells of human beings desperately clinging to our mortal existence because we still have so much to make up for:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
That’s just…sad.
I’m sure, though, that my friend has no such fears. She didn’t wait to share the Gospel message in word and deed, and continued to do so even as she fought the illness that has now laid her very low. Even today, when her bouts of consciousness are few and far between, she’ll still briefly smile a greeting when she sees a familiar face, before dozing off again.
The concluding benediction of the Divine Office’s Compline (night) prayer is a perfect summary of her current position:
The Lord grant us a quiet night and a perfect end. Amen.
If we too seek a peaceful passage to eternal life, we should start doing NOW what we promised in faith, and not put it off any longer.
