Richard Bollman, S.J.

HOMILY: 13 C 2010 Luke 9:51-62

"What Does He See in Us?"

So yes, Luke begins this resolute journey of Jesus

with these short sayings, these edgy remarks,

that I find rather paradoxical.

At first glance what you have is a confounding and demanding Jesus,

the one we might want to resist or forget about,

always asking for everything, and wanting it right now.

No delays: if you want to follow set aside your ordinary life,

forget about being like everybody else in the village,

look at me and don’t look back.

The guy who wants to bury his father . . . . you have to know,

his dad wasn’t dead yet. It’s a bid to finish out the family story,

then live your own. No wonder these remarks push us a little.

And yet our resistance is mixed with a kind of admiration and attraction

to his freedom, his sense of trust, his conviction in the nearness of God’s power.

Can’t you feel that draw . . . . foxes have holes, birds their nests,

but I’m freer than that, and more simple, and more risky.

If the Samaritans don’t want to welcome us, drop your anger, let it go,

we’ll go on to where we find a welcome elsewhere. We do it that way.

You can feel that in this Gospel passage, and maybe you feel it yourself

some kind of an interest and movement toward Jesus

that is not just an institutional obligation, not answers to questions.

If you let it touch you, your get into a deeper, vital inquiry

about direction, assurance, being clear about your purpose and choices in life,

that there would be some benefit to a closer contact with this Jesus.

There’s both approach and avoidance.

Yes, I need to open myself to pray these days, but first I have to get the kids through the summer and back to school;

or I’d like to make a difference, act for justice, but I haven’t really

read up on things and am not sure what’s required;

or yes I think Bible Study would be helpful to me,

but I would have to find a group first, a good study plan.

Underneath it all is a kind of faith that is in motion, and a little wary,

because it proposes that relationship is the main thing,

maybe the only thing.

To some extent, his very humanity

and his willingness to put up with ordinary people,

it coufounds your sense of boundaries.

You want to say, "don’t push like that. Come this far, but no farther.

I need to reconsider."

Here’s an incident, somewhat parallel, a memory of my own life

about these issues of contact, expectations, how they can suddenly shift.

In 1978 I spent a few months working in St. Joseph hospital,

in Tacoma Washington, part of my renewal progam as a recently ordained Jesuit.

So hospital work was new for me, and I took a liking to it,

partly because I had a very encouraging supervisor

who got me through my initial fears.

Several weeks into my time there, I was called to the ER

to pay attention to the family of a heart attack victim. Stan was his name, 62.

His wife said it was "his second, and it was a big one."

She was Aggie, a Catholic woman; but Stan, she said, was really nothing,

never a believer. They had three kids, two of them married, all of them

divided in loyalties and faith, not sure what to think or do, anxious.

Aggie seemed worried on all sides.

Oddly enough it was Stan who was the most settled of them all,

and in the days when he revived and responded to medication

I’d visit him in CCU. He was a funny man, patient with all that went on.

In my Roman collar and youthful smile, (I was just 40)

he called me Bing Crosby. He said he knew Aggie wanted me to convert him,

but that we’d be better off not going there. He was okay.

I saw Aggie only in the conflicts of her heart that all this raised,

and her fear of losing Stan. She was the main earner in their life recently,

the kids moving on and out, and worked as the office manager for

an urban police department in Tacoma.

She said to me once, her work helped her to handle tension.

I admired her, and sensed a long story underneath the bits I heard.

But before that ever came out, one weekend while I was away on a break

I got the call that Stan had died.

Can we have a Catholic funeral, that was her leading question.

At her church. The children were willing. I wondered about that last remark,

but I said "Of course we can."

And burial in a Catholic cemetery, that happened too,

where Aggie bought a plot for herself.

I remember the look of the place, the reception at their small home,

meeting all three chidlren again, with some of the grandchildren,

and then taking leave. I knew I had done the right thing with all this,

And I knew I had been touched by it.

I expected that was it. And soon I’d leave the hospital and Tacoma.

But not many days after, I was paged in the hospital.

Please call the reception desk.

Aggie was there, to meet with me. I went down assembling my professional best,

and thought she might be wanting some grief counsel, some help with the family.

Actually, something else was on her mind.

She said to me, as directly as she could,

"I don’t want to lose the first friend I’ve made in my new life."

You see what a difference happened right then, in me and in her.

Internally a lot of boundary issues came up:

among them my limited stay in Tacoma,

and my uncertainty about who I was, this person who she was seeing.

But I didn’t have a lot of time to think it through.

In retrospect I can tell you she was a very appropriate lady,

and eventually introduced me to her co-workers, her larger life,

and her niece and her husband

who lived down in Puyallup Valley toward Mount Rainier,

and she was interested in me and my family and my being a Jesuit.

It was an invitation simply to friendship

something free and simply presented to me, and I could have backed off.

And by the grace of God I recognized that this was a risk to take,

someting was at stake for me, as me. Maybe this was my renewal program.

In short I just realized that my life would be smaller if pulled back.

I wish I had time to tell you many stories about her and about myself

through that relationship, through the years

when I returned to California and then to the midwest,

and up to the season when she died of an extremely difficult cancer,

with great bravery and love.

What I learn from it is the freedom of being met without strings attached,

and to be recognized as yourself. You know about this surely.

What an open space it is. That’s what’s in these Gospel moments.

An open space with Jesus, however you feel it or want to respond.

Both the Jesus we admire, and the one we doubt and worry over.

If we keep him at a distance, in our thoughts or in the book,

we miss the shining, radiant face to face Jesus.

He seems to recognize something in us that we don’t rightly know yet!

And this Jesus is our only hope,

the one who so hopes to be trusted, even feebly,

trusted from our full and whole person,

from the person we are ourselves, sinners as we are.

With all the mistakes we make.

His move in our direction makes us uncomfortable,

not because we don’t want to do what he asks,

but because we see that the one thing he really wants is not a lot of deeds

but simply ourselves.

And that’s where we are, looking over our shoulder,

wanting to settle other affairs first,

wondering what it would be like to be poor with this strange inviting person.

It is well said, really only God could be human as Jesus is human.

There is a kind of tension in the life of faith,

a moving back and forth between believing and belonging.

Some people think that if they believe more, learn things and think them through,

they will come to belong to God more securely.

But the truth is, when we belong, and plunge in to that engagement,

with Jesus, with church, with our family or spouse or friends,

when we trust we belong: then we believe,

we find what life is about, and act and live out of that.

Belonging comes first. Then faith.

Look at your own life and see how it has been operating,

Page after page, encounter after encounter,

that’s what the Gospel is about. Belonging. And belonging precisely to Jesus.

Who is a lot like Aggie, or your own good friends: free, accepting, courageous,

and not pushy, once you get past the risk.

From that, everything else gets rearranged.