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Keeping the Promises and Living Fully
In the First Reading, Elisha is called by the Lord to be the helper and successor of the prophet Elijah. Elisha is a wealthy farmer with twelve yoked oxen. He is comparable to our mid-western farmer with a rototiller with immense power. He wants to go home and bid farewell to his family. Prophet Elijah reacts sternly. “Go back!” the prophet says to Elisha—and he seems to mean, “who wants you anyway?” In the Gospel, Jesus says in a similar terse way to a potential disciple who wants to go home first to his family before following Jesus. Jesus rebukes him and compares him to a person who ploughs looking at the ‘rear view mirror’ always! Why do the prophet Elijah and Jesus, whom we know to be very compassionate, take such a stern attitude? Both want to drive home the message that it is God who is calling them to ministry. If you don’t care very much about who is calling you, you might in the end fail to answer his call. It is undeniably easier to stay at home in the midst of what is small and familiar than to hazard the perils that come with answering a great call.In Elisha’s case, Elijah’s dismissive response to Elisha’s temporizing puts the fire of God in Elisha. He kills all his family’s oxen; then he uses their yokes for firewood to roast the oxen, and he gives the flesh to his servants to eat. Elisha is making sure that he can’t go home now. He is burning the bridge behind so that he cannot retreat. If you hesitate, if you think of an excuse to postpone answering the call, you aren’t really hearing the Lord calling; and so, you aren’t really going to follow him either, not now, not later. This is the reason why Jesus says that the one who sets his hand to the plow and looks back is NOT fit for the kingdom of heaven.
Everything else paled when Elisha was anointed by Elijah. He left all for the call. The commitment became his life. The promise was all he would keep of himself. We do not easily make commitments. Too many people even fear to make a full fledged commitment. Many marriages fail because, they live like “dress rehearsals” with
a mindset that if something is not according to our liking, we can just walk away. The more unwilling we are to make commitments, the greater the chance we fail at keeping the promise. “Let me bury my father first. ... Let me return to what I cherish.” I am not ready to give it all away.
Let us look at the rationale behind this way of acting. It is often presumed that freedom is a state of being loose and unattached. Some people go so far as to think they lose their freedom when they commit themselves. Freedom is construed as giving in to any immediate desire and impulse. And yet such a notion of freedom— “giving free rein to the flesh,” St. Paul calls it—is slavery. Actually, we only begin to be free when we start the process of self-definition called commitment. And our freedom is only realized when we give ourselves away in love.
Our commitments, ultimately, are our nesting place. They are where we reside, where we center our being. Such a prospect is awesome: that our fundamental task and responsibility is to commit in love. Comfort and escape, as well as other cravings of the flesh, entice us when we confront freedom’s awesome implications. In his book ‘The Doctor and the Soul’ Viktor Frankl, speaks about something fearful yet glorious about human responsibility. It is glorious to know that the future of the things and the people around us is dependent—even if only to a tiny extent—upon our decision at any given moment. Perhaps the only lasting things we humans make in this world are our promises, our commitments. Perhaps, too, our promises are the only parts of us that we ultimately keep. Without such making and keeping, it could be possible that we die having never fully lived. Discipleship is a call to commitment and in keeping our promise, we will be invited to the kingdom with the words of the Master, “Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Master.”
Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O