Readings of the day: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a; Psalm 89:2-3, 16-17, 18-19; Romans 6:3-4,, 8-11; Matthew 10:37-42
A week ago, I was preaching a retreat for our Basilian novice Bishoy Dawood, who is at the end of his novitiate year here in Edmonton and will profess first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience within my order next weekend. I invite us please to pray for Bishoy; some of us might remember him from when he served weekday Mass with me here at OLPH once or twice during his novitiate year. (And implicit in my opening lines here is a call for anybody who may be discerning a call to religious life, maybe as a Basilian—in which case, please come and see me—or to the diocesan diaconate or priesthood). On retreat, I preached conferences on our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and on our order’s motto, “Teach me goodness, discipline, and knowledge.”
I feel, every time I have spoken publicly on the religious vows, especially that of poverty, that I should have an official license made somewhere: Class one hypocrite. Because, visibly-speaking (I can speak for myself as a religious priest), I am not suffering. We live in an affluent country [and, here in Sherwood Park, an affluent community, on average]. We have food on the table and a roof over our heads. Now, there are poor and disadvantaged persons among us, I will guess even in this parish. I and my brother Basilians live at St. Alphonsus Parish on 118 Avenue in Edmonton, a neighbourhood that visibly reminds me of Jesus’ words to Judas Iscariot in our Gospels, every time I look or go outside: “You will always have the poor, but you will not always have me.” I learned recently that there are 80 000 Aboriginal people in the City of Edmonton, many living with trauma inflicted upon them over generations. There are many poor concentrated in our area of the city, people with addictions, recent migrants and refugees, and so on.
Whenever I speak on our vow of poverty, I do the common “preacher thing” of outlining the traditional Bible passages associated with poverty. Last weekend, I spoke about Jesus’ first Beatitude in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I spoke about the Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the rich man who wants to be Jesus’ disciple, has followed all the commandments since his youth, yet goes away sad because, the Gospels say, he is unable to part with his “possessions.”
On Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, let me emphasize that his material wealth is not the problem, the obstacle to discipleship. The possessions he is unable (or unwilling) to let go have nothing to do with money or material goods. The problem for the rich man is that everything becomes an object to him, something to be counted and costed, something of which he is unable to let go: His wealth, yes, but also the number of commandments to which he is faithful (and how faithful, and for how long he has been faithful), and discipleship of Jesus itself.
Contrast the rich man of the Gospels with the woman of Shunem in today’s reading from 2 Kings. Our reading begins by describing the Shunammite woman as “wealthy.” For the Shunammite woman as in Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, wealth is not and will not be the obstacle (or a help) toward right relationship with God and other people, toward acting in a right and godly way.
The woman in 2 Kings notices that the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s successor, is “passing through Shunem” as he frequently did. And Elisha apparently had a favourite café pit stop in Shunem each time he was in town. This reminds me of my pre-priesthood, pre-Basilian life when I was a lab technician and occasionally did house calls as far away as Rocky Mountain House. My favourite pit stop for lunch on house call days on that route was just outside of Bentley, Alberta, a coffee and sandwich shop called “Bean There.” Or, if any of us are ever traveling toward B.C. on the Trans-Canada Highway, your last chance for gas at Alberta prices and a decent lunch (if you are hungry) before the B.C. border is at the Husky at the top of the hill in the morbidly named village of Dead Man’s Flats. So, there are a couple of road trip pit stop recommendations from me.
The Shunammite woman recognizes Elisha as a frequent visitor to her town, so she calls her husband to help her to prepare her home to receive Elisha “whenever he comes to” them. Elisha is grateful for the Shunammite couple’s hospitality. So he calls “his servant Gehazi,” we hear, who says to Elisha that the only desire this otherwise well-to-do woman has is to bear a child. Here we have the frequent biblical motif of an elderly woman or couple longing for a child. (Please allow me to insert a prayer here for anybody among us or anybody we know experiencing infertility. This can be agonizing). Elisha ends this visit with the Shunammite couple by prophesying that, “in due time, [they] shall embrace a son.” And, if we continue in 2 Kings, Elisha’s prophecy comes true. And, still later in 2 Kings, the son dies, sadly, but Elisha raises him back to life.
The Shunammite woman and her husband are the picture of poverty. They live poverty in the way I, under a public religious vow of poverty, would like to live it, better than I do. Wait, did I just say that the Shunammite couple in 2 Kings today are the picture of poverty? I did. Why?
The Shunammite couple of whom we hear today in 2 Kings is such a great example of poverty not despite or, somehow ironically, because of their wealth. They are a great example of poverty because they are so unreservedly hospitable toward Elisha as he passes through their town. The Shunammite couple does not count the cost to themselves of building a whole new “small roof chamber with walls” onto their house and furnishing it with “a bed, a table, a chair, [and] a lamp,” all for when Elisha visits their town.
Now, maybe they do not count the cost of the home improvements because they are just that rich. Yet, if we think for a moment about some of the details 2 Kings gives us about this couple, we realize they are Shunammites. Shunem was a simple agricultural village in the Jezreel Valley near the Sea of Galilee, in the northeast of Israel. It was susceptible to drought. So, even though the Shunammite woman in today’s reading is said to be wealthy, her and her husband’s wealth is precarious.
The son they long for dies, only to be raised by Elisha, all within the same chapter 4 of 2 Kings from which our first reading is drawn today. And then, a little later in 2 Kings, Elisha advises the Shunammite family to flee to Philistia for seven years. They live there, in a foreign (non-Israelite, Gentile) land, to wait out a famine. All their wealth is lost—their home, with its rooftop addition built for Elisha, and their land— before Elisha ends the famine and restores to the Shunammite family what they had lost.
Wealth in and of itself is not the measure of how poor the Shunammite woman, her husband, and her son are. The measure of their poverty, which is always exemplary and does not vary with the cycles of gain and loss through the many vignettes of their story in 2 Kings, is that their wealth (or periodic loss of it) is never an object to be counted. They are generous and hospitable toward Elisha. And God rewards this pious family from a little agricultural Galilean village with restoration of their longed-for son to life, their home, their land, and with great friendship with the itinerant prophet Elisha when Elisha was probably looking for a simple coffee shop in town.
Jesus’ message in Matthew’s Gospel today is difficult for us to hear. I hope Jesus does not literally mean that I am not supposed to love my father and mother nearly as much as I love Jesus. [I should be careful here, since my mom and dad are among us at Mass this morning]! I think, in line with Elisha’s encounter with the Shunammite family in 2 Kings, Jesus is inviting us to be somehow like the Shunammite woman and her husband are toward Elisha: Welcome the prophet to town, into our homes, no matter how much or little material wealth we have. Be grateful and generous for the opportunity to be hospitable. Do not count the cost of hospitality and of discipleship, even if it is to the point of giving our lives: “Take up [your] cross and follow me.”
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that baptism is our initiation into the poverty to which Jesus invites us. We have all “been buried with [Christ] by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father”—and just as God, through Elisha, raised the Shunammite couple’s son and saved them from famine and loss of everything—“we too might walk in the newness of life.” We, too, might know the restoration of our eternal wealth, eternal life in Jesus Christ.
This is an invitation to poverty, sisters and brothers: Not necessarily to give up our material wealth, unless this has become no more than a precious, countable commodity, more important than God and each other in our lives. We never know when or how we will encounter God in another person, in the situations of our lives—in a small agricultural village in Galilee, in our care for somebody in need or in a situation of pain or loss, in a small coffee and sandwich shop in Bentley or Dead Man’s Flats, Alberta—until we have lived the poverty, the gratitude and hospitality without cost and commodification, to which our Lord invites us today.
