Sermon: On Attachment

When T. E. Lawrence went to Arabia during the Great War, he was astounded at the way Arabs spoke.  In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom he wrote, ‘[There was] a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation and repellent in its unsympathetic form.  Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision.  They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white...., a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns.  They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings.  They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.  This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing... Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes.  They inhabited superlatives by choice.' 

When radical Islamists take the rhetoric of jihad literally and act it out so terribly, they misread their own religious texts.  We in the west make a mistake if we fall into the same trap and imagine that this is authentic Islam.  The Qur'an is an ancient semitic book.  Its ways of speaking must be understood as Lawrence of Arabia saw.  And so must the Bible, to come closer to home.  It too is an ancient semitic book that is even more distant from us in time, but like the Qur'an, originating among ‘people of primary colours', and using language in the same sharply-etched ways.  We shouldn't expect our scriptures to echo the carefully nuanced discourse of the Church of England Doctrine Commission. 

Take today's gospel.  ‘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.'  Does not hate!  This is Jesus at his most extreme.  It wouldn't be difficult to discredit religion through sayings like that.  Now it's tempting to weaken the force of Jesus' words by some sleight of hand that concludes that he couldn't have meant what he said.  Well, when you're married to a psychotherapist, you soon learn that while you may not always say what you mean, you do always mean what you say.  We can be clear that Jesus means what he says, means it with the utmost seriousness.  The question is, how does he mean it?

An Old Testament illustration may help here.  In Genesis, Jacob takes two sisters as his wives, first Leah and then Rachel, the foremothers of the twelve tribes of Israel.  You'll recall that Rachel was Jacob's first love, but her father made Jacob marry Leah first.  The story says: ‘Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah'.  But only a verse later, the text puts it more sharply: ‘the Lord saw that Leah was hated.'  That is pure semitic hyperbole.  It's clear that Jacob did not detest Leah, he simply loved Rachel more. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, of God and mammon: ‘No-one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devote to the one and despise the other' (Matthew 6.24).  It's the same vivid hyperbole.  So it when today's gospel speaks about ‘hating' the members of your family if you want to follow Jesus.  Matthew has preserved the saying in a slightly different form: ‘Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me (Matthew 10.37).  That makes the meaning clearer.

Clearer, but not weaker.  Jesus goes on to explain.  ‘Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.'  The call, the summons, the demand is still all-embracing, absolute, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘costing not less than everything'.  One of the Prayer Book collects, following St Augustine, speaks about ‘loving God above all things' and asks that ‘our hearts may truly there be fixed where lasting joy is to be found'.  It's not a case of ‘hating' in the sense of detesting the good earth God has placed us on, or the people he has given us to love, or the gifts he has entrusted to us for our care.  Far from it, even for those such as hermits and religious who are called to a total act of renunciation in becoming the gospel's poor.  What we are called to is to examine where our loves, our hungers and our longings really lie.  If our relationships, our possessions, our race, our politics, our church or our country claim our absolute loyalty, then, the gospel says, our attachments are becoming idolatry.  When it comes to this life, there is no such thing as the ‘love that asks no questions'.  We cannot serve two masters.  The cross always puts to us the question Jesus put to Peter: ‘do you love me more than these?'

Augustine famously said at the beginning of his Confessions that ‘our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee'.  This is Jesus' meaning in today's gospel: that we should view all of life against the template of the cross, so that we begin to see how our human attachments are measured and judged by the cross.  This Friday is Holy Cross Day, an autumn reminder of Good Friday and the cost of our salvation.  ‘It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be, that God's own son should come from heaven, and die to save a child like me.'  His dying is wonderful, but it makes our living wonderful too as we learn to carry the cross and are re-moulded in the image of that holy sign, and find the disharmonies and distortions of human existence begin to be put right.  The truth of the passion is that as the shape of the cross becomes imprinted on our character, there is a purifying of our motives and a hallowing of our desires.  Our attachments are gathered up and given shape by our primary attachment of all, our love of God.  That's how we glimpse the transfiguration of what is rightly precious to us: our love for father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and life itself. 

Bonhoeffer said that when Jesus calls a man or a woman, he bids them come and die.  But in dying to ourselves, says the gospel, we are born into eternal life.  That's no hyperbole.  It's the voice and invitation of Love. 

Michael Sadgrove

Durham Cathedral, 9 September 2007

Luke 14.25-33