Leaving Your Sins: A Horrible Sunday Mass Sermon

Luke 9:57-62 (New International Version)

The Cost of Following Jesus

57As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go."
58Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
59He said to another man, "Follow me."
      But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
60Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."
61 Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family."
62Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

In today’s mass the passage was about… well, you can read it yourself. Most sermons I’ve heard about this passage were helplessly chaotic. That’s why I decided to write the sermon I heard today. Guess what? It took on a wholly chaotic way, no different than before or even worse.

I’m not going to drag myself in telling what it was about, for even though it was long, it can only be broken down to these points:
- Jesus asked us to LEAVE OUR SINS behind in order to follow Him
- and if the poor guy who said he wanted to say goodbye to his family first had asked Jesus more politely, Jesus wouldn’t have reacted so hard on him.

So, this mind-opening and strong passage about the dreadful cost of a true search for the Truth (including leaving all attachments to sweet and warm ideas behind) said by one of the brutal-est teacher ever has been reduced to nothing more than a joke about leaving your sins.

And if I may quote something from Shusaku Endo’s most important work, Silence (he actually used it in a slightly different term, but I find it appropriate to use now),

Christ "is like a butterfly caught in a spider's web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly; it has lost its true reality and has become a skeleton."

A skeleton...

I hate religions.