“Jesus said to the apostles, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place”.
I’m sure that we’re all familiar here with the “hard sayings” of Jesus – teachings like “sell everything you have and come follow me” or “you must hate your father and mother, if you would be my disciple”. Then there are his paradoxes, parables and obscure sayings – “If you would gain your soul, you must lose it” or “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed” or a “pearl of great price” or a sower and his seed.
Today, though, we get something different – something that we might think of as one of Jesus’ “painfully obvious sayings”. These are words of Jesus that say something so evident – at least so evident to anyone with even an ounce of sense – that they make us wince to hear them.
Listen again to what Jesus says to the Twelve as they prepare to hit the road for their first apostolic mission: “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place”.
That’s a bit like saying, “I found it in the last place I looked” or “Wherever you go, there you are!”. After all, it sort of goes without saying that you have to stay in a place until you leave it. How could it be otherwise? Yogi Berra would be proud.
But let’s look a little closer at what’s going on here. Maybe things aren’t so obvious as they seem.
Jesus reminds me a bit of a mother sending her child away to summer camp for the first time: “Don’t forget to change your socks. Write home every day. Don’t wander off! Be careful about strange looking plants! Have fun!”. You can picture the scene. Here he is, maybe twelve years old, rocking from foot to foot, wondering why mom is wasting his time with this stuff. Everything she’s saying is so obvious, and he can’t wait to get out the door.
Then the first week of camp passes, and he’s only changed his socks once, not a single letter has been written, he’s gotten lost in the woods, picked up a bad case of poison ivy, and isn’t even sure he likes camp at all! Suddenly he remembers his mother’s parting words and wishes that he had taken them to heart. They don’t seem so obvious now!
Jesus realized – just as that mother understands – that often it is the most obvious things that we most quickly forget when the pressure is on and we’re faced with distractions. And Jesus also knew that the main reason we so easily forget the obvious things and get caught up in non-essentials is this: our minds are usually several steps – sometimes many miles and days – ahead of our bodies and souls. We’re usually not really rooted where we are standing. We usually not fully present to the people right in front of us.
Think about what’s really going on when that mother is giving her son all that advice. In his mind’s eye, he’s already out the door, on the bus, at camp, and half-way through a carefree summer. He hasn’t even walked out the door, but he’s so far away in his imagination and anticipation that everything his mother is saying – all that obvious stuff – is just the distant buzz of background noise. He hasn’t left home… but he isn’t quite there either.
“Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place”.
Jesus understood that the moment the apostles began to dwell on the future – whether with excitement or fear – more than they dwelled in the present, they could never really carry his kingdom into the world. They would always be double-minded procrastinators, distracted by cares and fantasies, when the one thing necessary is to be utterly open to God’s real and caring presence in what the French mystic Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment”.
You see, the present moment is a sacrament because it is the one bit of time where we can find God now. We can’t find God yesterday. We can’t find God tomorrow. For neither yesterday nor tomorrow -- in fact, not even the last minute or the next – exists anywhere except in our heads.
We can only find God only in the present moment. And only in the present moment can we discover the next right thing, because it is only in the present moment that God calls and that our best motives and true duties can come fully to light.
And very often, we will discover that the next right thing to do is also the most obvious thing of all. It might be to act. It might be to wait. It might be to pray. But whatever it is, we will only discover it if we really stay – rooted and present – in the place where we are until God calls us to move on.
“Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place”.
Amen.
Fr. Chris King +
