This Sunday again we have heard a difficult passage of the Gospel…What I think we need to have in mind though is that it is a difficult Gospel because it is a Gospel for difficult times. The passage picks up where we left off last week, let’s remember that what Jesus is doing is that he is sending the disciples on their own to carry on his mission. Jesus knows very well that they will encounter hostility and rejection, and he certainly has in mind as well the possibility for very real persecutions and even martyrdom. After all, “(…) a disciple is not above the teacher“. Jesus himself was called a Satan (“Beelzebul”) by his opponents, the religious leaders, and something that is a little less known is that even some members of Jesus’s own family thought he had lost in mind (See Mark 3:21). This considered, it becomes easier to explain the rest of the passage: Of course Jesus is not asking us to abandon our families, to stop caring about them. We have to put that back into a larger context: Jesus preached all his life the love of neighbor, and most of the time our own families are our closest neighbors so we must love them! Yet it does not mean we have to agree with our families or to follow their expectations. Jesus warns the disciples that the message of the Gospel won’t always bring peace, rather it will bring “the sword”, which does not mean necessarily war but division, even inside the same household. Jesus experienced that in his own family. John tells us that “(…) even his own brothers did not believe in Him” (John 7:5). But Jesus encourages to look beyond that. People from their own families will become hostile to the disciples, but the Gospel has to mean more to them than their own families: if their families are ashamed of them because they preach the Gospel they should never be ashamed of the Gospel: “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my father in heaven“. In the end, we have to love Jesus more than life itself. I am almost certain it’s not about hating our own life, but it’s about having other priorities than saving our own skin, literally or figuratively. There is more to life than self-preservation or complacency.
And so, this text is difficult but it makes a lot of sense in difficult circumstances. Now of course we’re going to say: We don’t live in difficult circumstances, Christians in this country are not persecuted. That’s right, I would agree with the later statement, but maybe we need to rethink the former. It seems to me that actually we are in difficult circumstances. More and more people leave churches, raise their children with no religious education and there are less and less places where we seem to find opportunities to share our faith. This considered, we can spend some time blaming our society, its culture and people’s priorities but this passage of the Gospel invites us also to take a good look at ourselves as disciples, as the sent ones on a mission. And to me, what I observe is that most of the times we say we don‘t want to make people feel uncomfortable by sharing the Gospel, but maybe it is we who are uncomfortable. Jesus is very clear in this passage: sharing our faith is not supposed to be comfortable. It’s expected to be hard. It’s expected that we will be rejected, mocked or that we will being seen as foolish. And Jesus expects us to do it anyway, because the world needs to hear the Gospel.
Now I think it’s important to understand how it is done: Jesus’s way of sharing the Gospel is essentially, deeply non violent. It’s interesting that the passage concludes with Jesus telling his disciples that they have to be ready to lay down their lives because that’s really the principle of non violent action. Now of course violence can be physical, but it can also be verbal or psychological. This we have to renounce as well, we don’t share the Gospel by scaring people, making them feel guilty or inadequate as it happens too often. Rather Jesus always preached by bringing wholeness, healing, reconciliation and in this passage, the way Jesus invites his disciples to share the Gospel is by offering their testimonies: to tell others what they have heard, and seen, and experienced and how this experience was / is life transforming. In a way, it’s very simple: For us who have been Christians for decades, we just have to be willing to tell our own story, and also, I would say, we have to be willing to hear people’s stories, to see how God is already at work in their lives. Jesus always did that, he always listened to people and showed them how their faith was already alive. Jesus also showed that elected people, the chosen ones, are not always who we think they are and a lot of religious people hated Jesus for saying that, and really that’s also what our Old Testament lesson is all about so I would like to spend time on that today as well.
When I discovered the first lesson for this week, my gut reaction was: Well, this is too bad, I really started to like Sarah. We talked about her last Sunday, how Sarah had this beautiful, enduring faith, how she started to become sad and a bit bitter for waiting too long, and then how God answered the promise and brought back joy and laughter in Sarah’s life by giving her a son. So yes, it felt good to relate to Sarah. But today Sarah does something really awful, doesn’t she, with sending Hagar away?
To give you a little bit more of context, when Abraham and Sarah left their country to follow God’s call, they had to spend time in Egypt. Now we often imagine Abraham leaving his country with his wife, his nephew Lot and maybe a few other people but it’s not really the way it was. They had many other relatives and servants as well. They traveled with their cattle, with their belongings, and they had people to take care of all that. Hagar was very likely added to their servants when they spent time in Egypt. We know that Sarah stayed at Pharaoh’s house and that Hagar was an Egyptian and Sarah’s personal handmaid after that. So maybe that’s where Sarah found her. At any rate, Hagar was very close to Sarah, so close that Sarah wanted her to become her surrogate and asked Hagar to give a son to Abraham when she started to assume she would never get pregnant herself. But knowing this only makes matter worse for our story today: We could understand that Sarah would want to write off Hagar had Abraham cheated on her, but it is she herself who was responsible for the whole situation. Yet now Sarah has ended up having her own son, she discovers that there is not enough room for Hagar and her son, and she wants Abraham to abandon them on the way, since they don’t need them anymore. And so that looks very mean and something even more strange happens: God goes with the idea. Yet the surprise is that in the meantime God teaches a lesson to all the “chosen people”by making it very clear that Hagar is chosen too.
In the wilderness, not only God rescues Hagar and Ishmael from a certain death by giving them water, God sees and hears Hagar’s distress and comes to her help (his eyes are on the sparrow indeed!). More than that, God gives Hagar and the boy a future. And more than that, God makes to Hagar the same promise he made to Abraham! God says: “I will make a great nation of him“. God makes it very clear that Hagar and Ishmael are chosen too, that they matter. God acknowledges Hagar’s faith and God wants her offspring to prosper and to give glory to God. Well, I think it’s very important for us to be reminded of that, and to remember that Hagar is the mother of the Medianites people, the Arabs, and that she is the ancestor of Muhammed, the prophet of the Muslims. If we really believe that what Sarah does to Hagar is awful, maybe we should look at ourselves to see how often we discriminate people’s from other faiths, and how often we think we have the real God and that there is not enough room for all of us. If someone ever tells you that the Muslims don’t worship the real God, you would have to tell them that actually the Bible states quite the opposite!
The thing is, what happens to Sarah after she had her baby is maybe worse than the bitterness she had before God answered her prayer. Now she thinks she and her son Isaac are the only ones who matter, that only them have God’s favor and only them are God’s people. And that’s the danger for all of us: by becoming God’s people, we start to take ownership of God and to pretend there is no room for other people. But God’s heart is not limited! God’s plans are not limited! God does not send people away because God does not know what to do with them! One can only imagine what would have happened if Sarah had tuned her heart to God’s heart and if the two women could have found a way to raise their boys together. The whole face of the earth would have been changed. Our world still suffer today from the consequences of Sarah’s narrow mindedness.
But it’s still not too late to try, is it? Jesus sends his disciples on a mission, and as he does that he shows them that they are not chosen to be special and to keep to themselves, they are chosen to proclaim the good news. The good news for Christians is God revealed through Jesus. As we share our testimonies, we are invited to hear people’s stories and to find out how God is at work in their lives and what God has taught them. We need to learn from each other and acknowledge that God is bigger than our prejudices. The story of God is written everywhere and God has something special for everybody. The way we share our message, renouncing violence, practicing love and truth, is as important as the message itself. It may, actually, be the message itself: the good news of God’s love to all. This is this all encompassing love for all of God’s elected that was so offending to Jesus’s enemies and that raised so much hostility. May we be ready to stand in that truth.