Following the Gospel reading of the 12th
Sunday (Luke 9:18-24), the 13th Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke
9:57-62) is about the serious cost of the Christian discipleship. When God,
through Jesus, calls us to become disciples of Christ and to follow Jesus’
path, we must make a total commitment, without any reservation that could pull
us back to our past. God in Jesus want
us our perfect dedication to His mission. In a way, the level of commitment God
want from us mirrors that of commitment, which both a husband and a wife make
to each other in their Sacrament of Matrimony. Luke 9:59-62 may invoke Genesis
2:24, in this regard.
As a marriage between a man and a woman is a
manifestation of God’s desire (Genesis 2:18) - it is in God’s desire to have a
husband and a wife make each other’s total commitment to one another, it is, indeed, God’s desire for us to totally
commit ourselves to His will and mission. Our full commitment to God reflects
God’s commandment to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with
all our strength and with all our mind (Deuteronomy 6:5; Luke 10:27).
The 13th Sunday’s Gospel reading
describes how Jesus wants us to incorporate Luke 10:27 into our discipleship.
It is also his invitation for us to the perfect freedom and peace. The freedom
and peace is like Nirvana in Buddhism
concept, the psychospritual state completely fee from what Buddhists call klelshas (煩悩) – worldly and carnal desires, anxiety, insecurity,
doubts and bewilderment.
Psychologically, kleshas
indicates insecure heart, brittle ego. The psychospiritual state of ultimate
freedom and peace offers a taste of the
Kingdom of God, as it is what salvation attains. Such a psychospiritual state
is also what Buddhists strive to attain, Nirvana.
On his path toward glorification, Jesus suffered
tremendously and had to overcome all of his sufferings, while Shakamuni
(historical Buddha) had to overcome his sufferings in order to attain
enlightenment and awakening before entering into Nirvana. In a way, the sufferings of Jesus can be understood though
a possibility of him having kleshas
(i.e. Luke 22:39-46, Mark 15:34), even though he was a spiritually and
psychologically strong man (i.e. Luke 4:1-13), while it is possible to see that
Jesus entered into Nirvana with his
last seven words, “Father, into your
hands I commit my spirit”(Luke 23:46). Now, Jesus is calling us and
inviting us to attain this perfect freedom – the Kingdom of God, or Nirvana to put it in the Buddhist context,
the psychospiritual state perfectly free from suffering.
Whether we are Christian or Buddhist, as humans, we
all want to be free from suffering, which is believed to be caused by kleshas . Both Christian teaching and Buddhist teaching
guide us to purify our souls from kleshas
so that we may overcome suffering and attain Nirvana. For Christians, the
teaching of Jesus offers practical steps to overcome kleshas as he demonstrates these steps himself all the way to the
Cross. For Buddhists, Shakamuni, upon becoming Buddha, attaining awakening to
the Dharma, taught the way to dissolve kleshas,
based on his own struggles toward attaining the awakening, upon overcoming
series of temptations. That is why Christians seek Jesus’ teaching, Gospels,
while Buddhists pursue Shakamuni’s teaching, the Dharma.
The genuinely peaceful state, which is the Kingdom
of God in Christianity, and Nirvana
in Buddhism, free from anxiety and suffering, is what everyone desires. But, not
everyone can necessarily attain this perfect freedom and peace, because the
path to reach it is challenging enough to disillusion our naïve assumption and
fantasy of attaining this perfect state. The Jesus’ words in the Gospel
narrative for the 13th Sunday remind this truth.
In a strict sense, we really need to leave our own
families in order to fully commit ourselves to our serious pursuits of the
perfect state – whether you are Christian or Buddhist. It is because our
families are considered as a worldly factor and a potentially distracting factor
in our discipleship. This also reflects
God’s desire for a husband to leave his parents in order to become one flesh
with his wife (Genesis 2:24).
That is why Catholic priests, monks and nuns leave
their families and totally commit themselves to the service for Christ
practicing celibacy and living in their religious communities or parish
rectories, rather than living with their families. They take the three-fold vow
of poverty, chastity and obesity, for this reason. Likewise, Buddhist monks leave
their families in order to enter into their rigorous formation processes,
remaining celibate, so that they can fully dedicate themselves to the service
of the Dharma, the truth in Buddha’s teaching.
Like Luke 9:23-24, Luke 9:57-62 is another difficult
yet powerful paradoxical teaching of Jesus. On the surface, it appears to go
against the teaching of filial piety – if Luke 9:59-62 were interpreted
literally. But, Jesus sure did not mean to go against God’s commandment, “Honor your father and your mother”(Exodus
20:12; Deuteronomy 5:16) when he did not allow a man, who is interested in
following him, to wait until he can bury his father and when he did not allow
another man to bid farewell to his family (Luke 9:59-62).
Just as Jesus’command to leave every personal and
family matter completely and immediately to follow him (Luke 9:59-62) can be
viewed as antagonistic to the God’s commandment to honor(care for) our fathers and mothers (Exodus 20:12;
Deuteronomy 5:16), the concept of pabbajja was at first criticized in
China because it was believe to counter the Confucius’ moral teaching of filial
piety (孝).
Growing up in the Buddhist cultural context of
Japan, what comes to my mind in thinking of Luke 9:59-62 is pabbajja (pravrajana) in Buddhism. Pabbajja,which is an act of
denunciation of the worldly (lay) life
to enter into a sacred life, literally means “going forth”. Our attachment to a worldly life, lay life, which
includes our families, can compromise our commitment to the mission.
In Jesus’
words, what holds us back from “going forth” is the plow to keep one’s hand on
in Luke 9:62. To follow Jesus on his mission, we do not need the “plow” which
represents our worries to survive in this worldly life. Likewise, in Buddhist pabbajja,
monk’s life is totally dependent upon the alms from upasaka (upasika),
those who practice Buddhism without leaving their homes and families.
Pabbajja is
required, in a strict sense of Buddhism, to become a bodhissatva (菩薩),
which literally means one who strives for enlightenment. Through pabbajja, we can become authentic
seekers of enlightenment, as bodhissatva.
Being bodhissatva through pabbajja
is the way of attaining Nirvana by becoming Buddha and gaining prajna (wisdom) of Dharma. To put this
into the Christian context, becoming Buddha corresponds to attaining a
sainthood or Sainthood, while becoming bodhissatva
through pabbajja parallels
becoming a fully committed disciple of Christ by following Jesus’ command of
denouncing all worldly attachments, as described in Luke 9:59-62.
Speaking of pabbajja, both Jesus and Shakamuni left
their respective families. In Shakamuni’s case, he left and completely
abandoned his comfortable life in the royal palace and his status of prince. In
Jesus’ case, he left his mother, Mary, who was a widow then, when he began his
mission for the God the Father, at around age 30, while Shakamuni denounced all
his worldly prestige as the prince of his father’s loyal palace, as well as his
wife and child at age 29.
If you have to worry about your own family while
following Christ, then, it is like having an extra-marital affair.
Just as a husband who has an affair cannot fully commit to his wife as he is
supposed to, we cannot make our total commitment to Christ if we did not leave
our families immediately upon being called.
The importance of our total commitment is already
found in the Book of Genesis – when God
called Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.
Of course, God really did not want Abraham to kill Isaac, but He asked
him to sacrifice Isaac to test the level of his commitment to Him. God assessed
if Abraham would let his concern for Isaac get in the way of his commitment to
Him. By faithfully following God’s order to sacrifice Isaac, God noticed that
Abraham’s level of commitment and judged worthy of His covenant with him.
If we interpret Luke 9:57-62 as antagonistic to
filial piety, if we interpret Luke 9;23-24 as trivialization of life, then,
this logic would view Genesis 22:1-18 that God solicited Abraham to murder
Isaac.
Jesus wanted to make sure that those who are
interested in his mission will not follow him out of impulse and whim but they
rather know another set of cost of discipleship – in addition to self-denial
and embracing a possibility of martyrdom. This is why Jesus had to say things like,” Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but
the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head”(Luke
9:58), “Let the dead
bury their dead. But
you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God”(Luke 9:60), and “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks
to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God”(Luke 9:62).
When
Jesus said ,” Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have
nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head”(Luke 9:58), to a
man who wanted to follow him, he meant to teach that there is no security or
stability in life on the discipleship. A life of a disciple means living a life
on the edge and on the move, never to have a settled-in life. But, in a worldly
life, we all desire to have a secured life – especially financial security
(aren’t we all crazed about our retirement savings, 401K, pension, Social
Security benefit, etc?) – something to rest our head on, something to rest our
anxious heart on. But, to have a life on the discipleship, a life of pabbajja, we are to find a sense of
security in the kind of insecure life. This is a paradoxical aspect of this
Jesus’ teaching. To find a sense of security and peace in a life on the edge,
we must find ourselves in God for Christians and in Dharma prajna for Buddhists.
By saying “Let the dead bury
their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God”(Luke 9:60) to another man who wanted to follow him,
Jesus wanted him to understand the urgency in the discipleship. It means that
we cannot wait until our parents die or that we cannot wait until we become
free from family obligation, in order to become Jesus’ disciple. We must follow
Jesus immediately upon receiving a call – if we desire a secure life in God,
the perfect Nirvana-like freedom and
peace.
When Elijah called Elisha to be his attendant
companion to carry on God’s mission, Elisha was allowed to bid farewell to his
parents and cleared his earthly belonging by slaughtering all his lives stocks
and treating his people with them to make a closure on his worldly life (1
Kings 19:19-21). However, Jesus did not allow even such a time to anyone who
wants to follow him and whom he asked to follow him. This also teaches that we
must be ready, at any moment in life, to follow him, dropping every worldly
things – objects of our worldly attachment, whenever Jesus asks us to follow
him, in the manner of pabbajja. That
is why Jesus does not want to see our hand holding the plow when he calls us,
by saying, “No one who sets a hand to the
plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God”(Luke 9:62), though Elija let
Elisha use the plow one last time before he left his worldly life.
Following
Luke 9:18-24 from the 12th Sunday (last Sunday), reading Luke
9:51-62 on the 13th Sunday makes it clearer about what Dietrich
Bonhoeffer calls “costly grace”, required as the “cost of the discipleship”. By contrasting with Buddhism tradition of pabbajja, we can also associate Jesus’ teaching on
the discipleship to Buddhism, while deepening our understanding and
appreciation of the Christian discipleship.
Of course, it is not all about the “costly grace” to
be disciples of Christ in the pabbajja-like
way. The second reading of this Sunday, 13th Sunday, Galatians 5:1,
13-18, describes the benefit of paying the “costly grace” in our discipleship,
and the benefit is the freedom set by Christ for us. But, Paul warns us not to
abuse this freedom by giving into the fleshly and worldly temptations. Of
course, as we continue to grow in our discipleship, we can handle this freedom
better, as we gain stronger abilities to detach ourselves from our worldly
desires and carnal temptations for the sake of the Nirvana-like
ultimate and perfect freedom and peace, with joy.
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