Luke 14:25-33 (NRSV Updated Edition)
Now large crowds were traveling with him, and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
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"The Greek word for “possessions” in vs. 33 is an interesting one. It is a participial noun 'ta hyparchonta', from the verb 'hyparcho', which is a compound word from the words hypo, “under,” archo, “to begin” (the noun 'arche' can also indicate power). It's not even listed in Kittel's TDNT, but the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lexicon has its most common meaning as: exist (really), be present, be at one's disposal. Things which are at one's disposal are one's possessions or means. BAGD also indicates that in Homeric Greek this word is often used as a substitute for 'einai' (inf.), the “to be” verb. I take it that this “really exist” is an intensive form of “to be.”
- Exegetical note by Paul Nuechterlein on the Girardian Lectionary page for this Sunday (link below)
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"We could phrase this [...] by saying that the problem is not possessions but possessiveness. God gives us parents, children, siblings, and friends as gifts. Likewise we should give each ourselves as gifts to other people. The things we use in the world are likewise gifts from God and should be treated accordingly.
"The problem comes when we prefer to take other people and things rather than receive them. In such cases, the intensity of love we feel for others is actually possessiveness rather than love. We are told to “hate” parents, children, siblings, and friends so as not to be possessive of them."
- Andrew Marr, Abbot of St. Gregory's Abbey (Three Rivers, MI), from a blog post titled “God's Kingdom as Gift” (https://andrewmarrosb.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/gods-kingdom-as-gift/)
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"So he's setting this out and then he says: So, therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your - the Greek word here is - I'm just going to get this right - hyparchousin - which can mean possessions but it actually means more: it means 'your being', 'your essence', any advantage you might have, your profit. So it means anything that profiteth, to use nice Jacobite language.
"So therefore none of you can become disciples if you do not give up anything that might give you an advantage: your very being, your possessions - everything. He's saying that the greatest strength, the strength of the Lord and his anointed, the one who is actually going to be able to fulfil the building of the new tower, is the one who is treated as nought by family, friends and children, and has lost all the things that hold him or her in being.
"This is a tremendously, as you can imagine, difficult teaching, saying: If you want to follow me, it's not a question of ‘I demand that you engage in pseudo-masochistic exercises’; it's that any leverage that gives you being now is going to get in the way of your being weak enough to conquer all these forces."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYIvDVIem8I)
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"[A] huge part of what Jesus came to do is to show us who God really is, which is ultimately Good News. But it is also challenging as hell, because we evolved with our own ideas of who god is. And they are surprisingly difficult to let go of. Today's challenging Gospel Reading gives us a big clue as to why.
"First, there's that matter of giving up possessions. Our usual human gods are the ones who bless us with good things when we are good and curse us with the loss or absence of good things when we are bad. These gods make sense of the world for us in terms of how we set things up, namely, as rewarding what's deemed as good behavior and punishing what's deemed as bad behavior. When we are deserving, God blesses us with good possessions. That's how our entire society is constructed, right? Working hard and getting what we deserve.
"Second, there's the matter of hating family. The blessing and curse thing works not only for individuals, but also for groups of people, for communities. God blesses or punishes us as a family, or tribe, or nation. God is our God, on our side. We count on our God to keep us safe against our enemies. In an us-and-them world, it is good to have God on our side. “God bless America!” Right?
"Does this God sound familiar? The God who is on our side and blesses us with good things, many possessions? [...] But I have come to believe that Jesus came to divest us of that human-made God and show us who God really is, and it's not that God.
"First, the true God of Jesus is the God of everyone, the God of the whole creation, so there is no us-and-them. There is only us. That's why Jesus said outrageous things like, “Love your enemies.” Because there is no us and them, there is only us. The true God is not the god behind any of the divisions we humans create. The true God is the one behind the oneness of everything, the God bringing all things into harmony through love. So we need to let go of all ideas tied to us-and-them thinking, including our family as separate from anyone else's family. We need to let go of mother and father, sisters and brothers, and receive all human beings as part of God's family, our family.
"And so God also doesn't go around blessing some and cursing others. The promise to Abraham and Sarah right from the beginning is that their family was to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1-3). It's supposed to be win-win, not win-lose. Again, Jesus makes this clear right from the start by beginning his ministry with the beatitudes in Matthew's Gospel: blessed are the poor, the meek, the grieving; and what we already heard from Luke's Gospel, a blessing to the poor, the sick, the oppressed.
"In short, Jesus is flipping things on us, declaring blessings for those in this world we usually count as cursed. Jesus is teaching us that God doesn't reward the good and punish the bad. We don't receive possessions because we deserve them; we receive them as gifts of God's graciousness. All of life is a gift! Not something to be possessed! So we also need to be able to let go of our possessions as possessions, and to receive them instead as gifts.
[...]
"I think coming to faith in God anew [...] is being able to experience one's possessions, even one's family, as pure gift. It is being able to survive death by being in oneness with all of life — and the ground of all life, God. Jesus, our big brother, came to help us grow-up into that life of grace, a way through the cross to resurrection. It is the experience of “eternal life” here and now because it is the experience of life as pure gift."
- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from a sermon by delivered on September 4, 2016 (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper-18c-sermon-2016/)
[Source of Exegetical Note and links to Andrew Marr and Paul Nuechterlein sermon, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper18c/]