Urgency and determination

In Greek mythology, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, wanted to give a respectful burial to her brother Polynices.

However, King Creon, the brother of Jocasta who ascended the throne of Thebes, decreed that Polynices' corpse was not to be buried or even mourned because he betrayed his own country.

Furious at such disobedience, the sovereign condemned her to be buried alive. This tragedy, addressed by playwrights: Sophocles, Jean Cocteau, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, features one of the highest expressions of consciousness and inner freedom.

In Jesus' time, it was equally essential to bury the dead. For an Israelite, being attentive to the poor, the afflicted and the deceased was part of the very heart of mercy.

The burial rite was all the more decisive because only the ungodly were deprived of this fundamental respect due to every human being.

Then what? How can we interpret Jesus' hardness towards this man who quite naturally asks him leave to go bury his father before he walks with him? It's shocking, incomprehensible. 

And that's not all, since a little further on, to another future disciple who says to Jesus: "I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home," he answers even more dryly: "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God." What the hell bit him?

There is no need to beat around the bush, to soften, to attenuate, to relativize. There are unbearable words in the Gospel.

However, we must try to interpret this almost inhuman requirement. I think back to Pier Paolo Pasolini's film, The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), and to this Christ always on the move, always in a hurry, as if there was a fire, as if he was running urgently, as if the whole Gospel was moving at a run.

Isn't that what it feels like here? Urgency and determination.

Moreover, Luke writes, a few verses above: "When the days for Jesus' being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem,and he sent messengers ahead of him." The Greek text even says, more precisely: "He hardens his face towards Jerusalem.”

Jesus walks to the cross and clenches his teeth. His days are numbered. The final confrontation is approaching. It is no longer the time to hesitate, to procrastinate, to turn around, to bury the dead.

We can hear His fears in facing obstacles, His confinement, His wounds, His grief... It happens that an engagement requires a sometimes very painful break, and that we must, to go forward, no longer look back on our past.

Gospel texts that are almost "impossible," like this one, must sometimes be tried to be carried within oneself, like a thorn in the flesh. Because it could be that one unexpected day, who knows? They involve difficult steps.

A parable told by Antoine Nouis in his remarkable commentary on the New Testament, happily interacts with this disconcerting Gospel passage.

On a bus seat sits an old man holding a bouquet of freshly picked flowers. On the other side of the alley is a young girl whose eyes are constantly on the flowers. The bus arrives at the station where the old man is to get off.

Before leaving the bus, he puts the bouquet on the girl's lap: "I see that you like flowers," he says, "and I think my wife would like you to have them, I'll tell her that I gave them to you.”

The girl has no time to react that the old man has already got off the bus. She looks out the window and sees him... pushing the gate of a small cemetery.