Thirteenth Sunday in
Ordinary Time
1 Kg 19. 16b,
19-21 Psalm 16 Gal 5.1, 13 – 18 Lk 9. 51 – 62
The
entire ninth chapter of Luke’s Gospel speaks of discipleship. Last week we heard Jesus ask, “Who do you say
I am” and Peter’s graced response, “The Christ of God.” It appears he doesn’t really understand his
own insight and the disciples surely don’t understand when Jesus speaks twice
of the suffering that lies ahead of him.
Yet
Jesus is “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” He does understand that he is walking into
his own suffering and he is freely choosing to follow the path to which his
call leads him. “I have come that you
may have life and have it to the full.”
Today
we hear that on the way he meets three people.
The first one approaches Jesus on his own initiative saying, “I will
follow you wherever you go” and Jesus tells him that, if he is in Jesus’
company, he will have nowhere to lay his head.
Jesus himself invites a second person:
“Follow me.” The man says he
wants to first bury his father – we don’t know if his father just died or if he
wants to wait until he is free of all his family obligations – but Jesus
reminds him (and us) that there is an urgency to proclaim the Kingdom of God. The third person is also ready to follow but
wants to say goodbye to his family at home and the life he is leaving. Jesus reminds him (and us) that if we set out
to follow Jesus, we can’t always be looking back over our shoulder to what was
or what could have been. We have no idea
what happened to the people called in today’s gospel but we do know that, to
follow Jesus, requires a single-hearted resolve and freedom in Christ of which
Paul speaks in today’s second reading.
Each
of us is surely invited to reflect on our call to follow Jesus. For most of us, our call to be baptized into
Jesus was a call decided upon by our parents but most of us remember well the
call we received to the vocation in which we would live our discipleship. Whether we are religious, married, or single
we once said, “This is how I want to spend my life.” The call might have come early or later in
life, it might have been smooth or produced resistance in us, it might have
been like a whisper we finally recognized or it might have hit like a bolt of
lightning. The manner in which I knew
that this was how or with whom I was meant to spend my life and said “Yes,” is
very special to each person.
That
initial call to follow Jesus sets us on a path of love and service but, like
the people in the gospel, the path is unknown. In life there are many other
calls that keep us following the Lord.
Some come from the Spirit speaking to our own hearts, some come as
invitations from others - be they welcome or abrupt. Yes, the path has many twists and turns that
invite us to ask, “What are you saying Lord? What do you want?” Surely, our path of discipleship has had
great joy and deep pain. It definitely isn’t exactly a path we imagined or
planned! We may studied one thing and
done many other things, a spouse or a child may have died, I may have loved my
work but it closed or I was unexpectedly fired, a surprise phone call might
have invited me to something entirely new, my health or a disability may have
led me in a different direction…
Yes,
the call to discipleship and our willingness to “follow wherever you go” is a
true adventure and a grace-filled one at that!
As disciples, we listen to the one who calls and who guides us with love
in every moment.
Like flowing water is
a [disciple’s] heart in God’s hand;
he directs it
wherever he pleases. Proverbs 21.1
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HICKOK
The 1789 mutiny on the Bounty saw a rebellious crew hijack their ship
and build their own island community. Commanded by William Bligh, HMS
Bounty left England in December 1787 on a mission to collect breadfruit
saplings in the South Pacific. During a five-month layover in Tahiti,
many of the ship’s crew became enamored with island life and even
married the local women. They also became increasingly dissatisfied with
Bligh, who often flogged his men for dereliction of duty. Shortly after
the Bounty left Tahiti in April 1789, a group of disgruntled
crewmembers revolted and took their commander prisoner. Led by master’s
mate Fletcher Christian, the mutineers forced Bligh and 18 loyalists
into a small launch and abandoned them at sea. Amazingly, Bligh
eventually led this dinghy on a 3,600-mile voyage to a safe port in
Timor. He would go on to weather two more mutinies during his long naval
career.
Although it was initially sparked by a mundane argument over food,
the Potemkin mutiny became one of the pivotal events in the 1905 Russian
Revolution. The revolt occurred during the Russo-Japanese War when the
700 crewmen of the battleship Potemkin were given rations of borscht
made from maggot-ridden meat. Told to eat the tainted broth or face
extreme punishment, the sailors rebelled. Under the leadership of a
revolutionary mariner named Afanasy Matyushenko, the crew killed nearly
half the ship’s officers in a bloody shootout before commandeering
Potemkin and the torpedo boat Ismail.
On the night of September 21, 1797, the Royal Navy vessel Hermione
was trawling the Caribbean when the crew initiated the bloodiest mutiny
in British naval history. Furious at the draconian punishments meted out
by their captain, Hugh Pigot, roughly 30 men split into groups and
launched a coordinated attack on their superiors. The rebels—many drunk
on rum—stabbed Pigot to death in his cabin and then proceeded to
brutally slaughter several officers with cutlasses and tomahawks. Once
in control of the ship, they dragged the rest of the officers to the
main deck. Those whom the crew approved of were spared, but the rest
were simply tossed overboard. In total, 10 officers were murdered during
the uprising.
The British explorer Henry Hudson made four famous voyages to the
United States and Canada, but his tireless efforts to locate the
Northwest Passage ultimately provoked his crew to rebel against him. In
1610 Hudson led his ship Discovery to the frozen waters of modern-day
Canada in an attempt to find a new western route to Asia. While the
explorers succeeded in locating the Hudson Bay—later named in Hudson’s
honor—their ship became lodged in pack ice, forcing them to spend a
treacherous winter ashore.
Germany’s Kiel mutiny began as a sailors’ rebellion and eventually
sparked the German Revolution and the end of World War I. The uprising
began in October 1918 when Germany’s exhausted sailors learned of a plan
to launch a last-ditch attack against the British Royal Navy. Unwilling
to take part in what they saw as a suicide mission, crews at the port
of Wilmershaven simply ignored their orders and refused to prepare their
ships for battle. When the protest’s ringleaders were rounded up and
arrested, it triggered a bloody mutiny that soon spread to the nearby
city of Kiel.
One of the only shipboard mutinies in American history occurred
during the Vietnam War. In March 1970 two merchant marines named Clyde
McKay and Alvin Glatkowski held their captain at gunpoint and
commandeered the supply ship Columbia Eagle. Abandoning most of the crew
in lifeboats, the two hijackers changed course and steered toward the
neutral nation of Cambodia. After arriving in the port of Sihanoukville,
the mutineers informed authorities that they had seized the ship and
its cargo of 10,000 tons of napalm as an act of protest against the
Vietnam War.
1969-70 - Buffalo Bisons
1960-61 - Springfield Indians
