Seek ye first...

A few weeks ago, I went to the city of Gotha in Germany.  It’s one of those idyllic German towns based around an elegant castle, with a large green park, an orangery – and an excellent research library.  But the most famous building in Gotha is a square yellow house on the corner of a side street.  It doesn’t look much from the outside, but here is where the German Workers’ Party was born, back in the 1870s.  Here was drafted a programme of wide-ranging, but practical reforms, designed to protect workers and limit the exploitation so common in nineteenth century Europe, even in a town as genteel as Gotha.   Workers across Germany welcomed it with great enthusiasm.  But when Karl Marx heard this, he was outraged.  His Critique of the Gotha Programme excoriated the new Party, denouncing their gradualist approach and their failure to push for a proper, communist revolution to sweep away the whole capitalist apparatus.  And thus Gotha became a symbol for the clash between idealism and pragmatism, revolution and reform.   

Personally, I’ve always been sympathetic to the Workers’ Party, their efforts to improve conditions even if they couldn’t make them perfect.   But I’ve found myself challenged by today’s gospel reading.  For those who come to Jesus in this story – like so many of the people in Luke’s gospel – are people who share some of the reformist inclinations of Gotha.  They’re not out for wholescale revolution, they just want to make life better, to become a little bit holier.  They want to love and serve God, they respect Jesus greatly, and they’re honestly willing to put in the hours.  They just want to make sure this doesn’t damage what they already value in their own lives and relationships.   But when they encounter Jesus, they find him unsympathetic.  He offers instead a radical invitation, a call to seek the kingdom beyond and before all else.

Throughout the gospel Jesus leaves people challenged, usually unsettled, and just occasionally filled with joy as the implications of his answers begin to touch their hearts.   In our reading this morning, though, there is a fresh sense of urgency to this pattern, as Jesus leaves Galilee and begins to travel towards Jerusalem, a city so fraught with meaning for all those around him.  As he journeys, he will demand a response from the people and the places that he encounters, a response of welcome or of hostility.  Men and women will come to him, pledging their loyalty and promising to share in his mission, hoping that they might find in Jesus the completeness and meaning that they so desire.   And yet, as we see here, Jesus will so often disappoint them, casting discipleship in terms so extreme that they cut through all ties of family or society.  Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to distract from service in the kingdom of God.

In our passage this morning Jesus is at his most uncompromising.   The people who come to him are willing, committed, anxious to share in the life that Jesus offers.  All they ask is to fulfil the basic obligations of family, or of decency; they do not want to abandon their families without even saying goodbye.  And perhaps they hope that Jesus would be sympathetic, that his movement would make them more dutiful sons and better neighbours.  After all, one of the Ten Commands is that we should honour our parents, and Jesus criticised those who used religion as an excuse to avoid their family obligations, in particular the obligation to support their parents.  But here Jesus will have none of it.   The very thought of balancing discipleship with even the basic demands of family and social life is cast to the side.  The ‘dead’ must bury the dead.

We do not know how those people responded - probably they were just as shocked as we are.  Certainly there is no denying the force and urgency of Jesus’s words, particularly to those who are keen and bright-eyed, anxious to be good people and to ‘do Christianity’ well.   Those would be disciples were, it seems, happy enough with the ethics and morals around them, with the way things were; they knew it wasn’t perfect but that was no reason to rock the boat too far.  Yet, as we see so often in Luke, Jesus has no desire simply to improve the status quo.  His message is different, a call to live first and foremost for the kingdom of God.   From that, everything else will follow.

Jesus’s call is dizzying and disorientating, at first glance it even seems to cut asunder our bonds of family and relationship.    But it is not about destroying the old system in the name of a new - that is the mistake his disciples make when they call for fire to burn down the recalcitrant Samaritan town, perhaps a mistake too of revolutionary movements that ignore the real lives of those around them.  Jesus is instead demanding our own transformation, a new ordering of our own priorities, and one that will lead through the Holy Spirit to a new way of living across our communities.   For if we let go of the structures we cling to, we have a genuine chance to build them anew.

This theme of transformation is echoed in St Paul’s message to the Galatians.  These gentile Christians were struggling to work out how to adapt their lives, how much of the Jewish law they needed to take up, what kinds of rituals and practices they should follow.  For Paul, however, they are looking at things the wrong way round – what is needed is not new plans and policies, or reforms to their social customs.  What they need instead is much more simple and much more radical.  It is to put their trust and their hope in God and to be led by the Holy Spirit.  Then they will see their communities grow and flourish, not divided by their faith but held together in love.  For commitment to God and following Jesus does not mean the abandoning of friends and family, but a deeper and more generous relationship with them.  If the Galatians will only have courage and faith, they will find that what they most long for will come to pass – that the Holy Spirit will unite them in ways more powerful than they could ever have imagined.

 As I’ve been reflecting on Paul’s words, I’ve been revisiting the Gotha Programme and Marx’s critique (a text I read each summer with first year students).  Marx called on the Programme’s authors to be more ambitious, less willing to allow the structures around them to determine who they were and what they dreamed of.   Perhaps I see more clearly now how dangerous it can be when we refuse to let ourselves truly be challenged, and how important it is to raise our eyes right up to heaven, to the Kingdom of God coming high on the horizon.   For it is when we seek first the Kingdom of God, that real change can happen and the fruits of the Spirit come forth in the world.