“Called Back to the Plow” [sermon]

Rev. Dr. Douglas B. Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

July 2, 2023

"A person's unhappiness never lies in his lack of control over external conditions, since this would only make him completely unhappy."

-Kierkegaard

"The gospel proclaims an imminent revolution, when nothing will remain as it is: 'And see the last shall be first, and the first, last.'” --Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 67.

OT Reading: 1 Kings 19:15–21 

15 Then the LORD said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. 16 Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. 17 Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. 18 Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

19 So he set out from there, and found Elisha son of Shaphat, who was plowing. There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him. 20 He left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” Then Elijah said to him, “Go back again; for what have I done to you?” 21 He returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out and followed Elijah, and became his servant. 

NT Reading: Luke 9:51–62

 51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; 53 but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” 55 But he turned and rebuked   them. 56 Then they went on to another village.

57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” 

While the party line of our denomination is that Sunday lectionary readings do not constitute a “fit,” meaning a unified message, there are quite often thematic linkages between the OT and NT readings.

The necessity to find these links is to have a well-worked out interpretive framework of the Bible, which in my recently published book is the metaphysical architecture of grace.

Grace’s architecture is what the Bible reveals: God’s program for justice, historical progress, and the ethical call to virtue and human “immanence”— the human imaging of God by actively dispensing God’s transcendent grace to neighbors.

    This divine will of grace that created life and then continues to sustain and redeem it from human sin is the metaphysical and central interpretive framework to interpret historical examples of both rebuke and redemption in the Bible.

The thematic and symbolic link in this morning’s OT and NT readings is the yoked plow.

 In the OT, it is laid down.

In the NT, it is picked up.

In the OT there is a material, agricultural sense for the plow, while in the NT it has a spiritual sense in working seed into the kingdom soil, which is the spirit of grace.

A marked spiritual and historical transformation proceeds through the plow laid down in the field by the hands of the national prophets Elijah and Elisha, and then spiritualized by the messiah who not only restores but focuses disciples’ attention on diligence and “not looking back” taking up the plow anew, one transformed in the Spirit.

This strong transition of direction and spirit suggests not only an historical change in Israel’s national destiny, but also a strong ethical redirection and focus for disciples.

This redirection is crucial to understand as Christians are continually lured to consider that their role in history is to recapitulate Israel’s violent, nationhood story.

That story of national accountability is realized in the historical boomerang of the sword: the swords of Elijah and Elisha. Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall  kill. That sword ever boomerangs. Violence begins a cycle of violence: even the pagan Greeks recognized that. National Israel becomes hammered into fragmented vassal communities well before the end of the prophetic age.

We know this by how Jesus applies the symbols of yoke and plowing in contrast with that of Elisha. There are strong directional verbs which pick up this transformation of national symbols.

Israel moves into another historical phase with Elisha around the 9th C BCE—

to promote other nations to wage war on Israel’s behalf.

That phase is ended when the OT prophetic age culminates with Malachi around 400 B.C.

At that point, Judea as national Israel’s successors becomes stuck inside the imperial dominance of the Seleucid Greeks then the Romans.

But in the earlier national phase of the prophets, Elijah passes by Elisha plowing his fields with a team of oxen.

Elisha represents the agricultural phase of Israel’s history,

but now Elijah is going to pass to him the prophet’s mantle over a new phase of Israel’s history:

its Machiavellian struggle with the idolators surrounding it.

Elijah lays upon Elisha his cloak—mantle—and calls him to promote armed struggle.

Elisha as prophetic representative of the Israelite people lays down his plow, slaughters his oxen, and by this new military careerism will try to feed and secure his people from the flesh of conquest.

Elisha asks that Elijah permit him to first go and take leave of his family, a nostalgia for tradition and blood lines that Elijah allows but Jesus later will not.

In the New Testament, Jesus recalls his disciples as the new people of spiritual Israel, which the Apostle Paul calls the “Israel of God,” to return to the plow .  

To take up the plow is to reconstitute the spiritual industry that brings forth the kingdom of God.

This is a highly marked contrast, so that we know (especially in the context of the Sermon on the Mount) that the followers of Jesus are not constituted by him for an Elijah/Elisha mission of anointing sword-wielding kings.

Like elsewhere too numerous to note this morning, Israel has gone through transitions of nationalized vanities.

 But in our reading from Luke, taking up the yoke to plow is the messianic and conclusive phase of the now spiritually-reconstituted people.

Spiritual Israel.

The church of disciples.

Rather than following a team of oxen, the Israel of God are now yoked to Christ in union with the Holy Spirit.

They follow now not an economic or military-industrial role, but are called to “announce”-- go and give notice of the kingdom of God. 

The Greek work is διάγγελλε—“give notice of and to”--the kingdom of God. “Giving notice” is not simply proclaiming and evangelizing, but the very context of this story is the manifesting “fitness” of those who take up the yoke of Christ.

That is, their conduct indicates this fitness.

Not just voice but practice demonstrates to onlookers the arriving and fitting of the Kingdom of God.

As I ever try to distinguish from other religious factions focused on simple belief and announcement alone, the kingdom demonstration and its call to witness is active, ethical, and aesthetic/poetic.

 It speaks the language of modernity as it demonstrates by virtues the kind of transformed life that is admirable to onlookers.

Those to whom we are called by this story to “give notice of and to” the Kingdom.

It is not Elijah’s kingdom,

ours is not Elijah’s call to sell our implements and slaughter our means for feeding others by the sword,

but to take up the yoke and plow instead of the sword, planting the seeds of shalom and tending them by the virtues that make peace.

Could this be any clearer?

Not for militarized Christians, tragically.

To circle back to our OT reading:

the instrumental phase of Israel’s national destiny under Elijah was taking up a punitive role of the prophetic.

The instrumental and arrogating role of the sword, rather, that substituted for the humble and fructifying role of the plow. 

As Judea was later experiencing imperial domination, Second Temple Judaism’s book of Sirach was written to announce the expected second coming of Elijah to bring retribution in the same way as the first: recapitulating history rather than progressing it toward the conative will of God;  its theodicy indicated by the Hebrew word in Sirach used in the sense of ‘recompense’ which promotes the ugly vanity of executing vengeance against the "nations."

The question should be asked: “why would the all-knowing and eternal God require a historical do-over?”

 A doppelganger Elijah--an Elijah boomerang--to re-arm Israel’s friends?

A new emperor Cyrus to empower American Trumpians? 

The answer is, God does not need to repeat history.

The whole project of looking for OT types recurring cyclically in historical time is ignorant of the age of the messiah.

The history of grace does not and need not repeat.

History is not cyclical, though sin ever rhymes.

If we look for a repetition of history, we are looking for the power of sin that ever repeats the same ol' vanities.

So my first point is this: the history inside the metaphysics of grace does not repeat.

Israel’s history progresses from nomadic to bondage to liberation to settled peasant agriculture then to monarchy then to material and prophetic militarism and now the unfolding age of the kingdom of grace.

The Book of Sirach’s “turning back” expectation of Elijah returned—

as if God failed the first time with this figure—

suggests why Ben Sira’s writings were excluded from Christian canonization. John the Baptist is identified by Mark as the spiritual return of Elijah to reorient Israel to make God’s paths in the wilderness straight. The new Elijah was the prophet of repentence, which prepares the way for a radical historical transformation. Metaphorically, Israel is to take its eyes from the expectation of a militarized messiah announced by a return of the old type of prophetic Elijah.

Instead, Israel’s Messiah, in the Gospels, will reinterpret the OT pattern of the prophetic age situating plowing as the active imaging of grace by God’s imagers.

History is progressive in terms of the realization of grace in immanence.

My first point restated is: Recapitulating military adventurism is THE national sin.

While God ever returns with mercy and grace, God does not return with figures of violence.

The disciples calling down fire is a (recompensatory) punishment rejected by Jesus.

The work for the Kingdom is NEVER intended for the destruction or compellence of the unreceptive.

Secondly: Jesus says that the “new call” to the disciples to take up the plow that Elisha laid down requires that the plower not look back.

 To take up the plow, Jesus gives a pronouncement: 

if you look back you are not “fit” for which the kingdom is fitted,

language that points to practical crafts and conduct, not simple and static beliefs.

This passage is often preached as warning against procrastination (or regret or quitting). Even by the usually astute Eugene Peterson in The Message.

But I think this is simplistic and misses the ethical point.

This passage gives a repeated role of moral “directionalities” --turning to, looking back.

Elisha seeks the nostalgia of his family tradition, the imperial hold of the past, of jejune and unwise sentimentalities.

Yet Jesus won’t allow this nostalgia, this simplistic traditionalism.

Eccl. 7: 10 is germane here, my new "go to quote:”  

 Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?”

    For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.

But “looking back” is to look at the plowed rows points to the danger of ethical consequentialism.

Luke is contrasting Jesus with Elijah and Elisha and OT instrumentalism concerned with compulsion and the lookout for effectiveness compared with NT ethics of freedom from consequential accountability from strategic ethics accomplished instead by bottum-up virtues.

The OT was concerned with the national destiny of Israel accomplished by compulsion and strategic instrumentalism—how the sword is ever resorted to plow through world.

The NT, on the other hand, is concerned with the Kingdom of God accomplished in forward-looking virtue and liberation in and for grace.

Do what’s right and virtously effective for what God calls us locally.

Not what is happening outside in the world.

Not by judging the effects of what happens from our discipleship plowing.

We don’t judge our activities by the plowed rows, by the Spirit rigged sail boat’s wake, which is Traditionalism.

Now, we are called keep our eyes firmly on the future and its unfolding task of progress.

Luke says twice! that “[Jesus’] face was set toward Jerusalem.”

Doubly emphatic future orientation.

Not looking back at what he had accomplished so far.

Luke makes this process explicitly, morally redirective:

 v. 54 But he turned and rebuked them [turning is a moral concept, not an instrumental], contextualized by v. 62:  Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is for the kingdom of God.”

 Fit [effective, but not by consequence, by task and goal-accomplishing ethical virtue].

That’s my second message today:

Don’t look to the immediate consequences of your kingdom task:

keep plowing neighborhoods in gentleness for spreading the virtuous seed ahead,

trusting God for the ripening and harvests of your mission and call.

Your conduct.

This is a new era that follows from  Elisha slaughtering his 12 oxen, symbolic of the workers in Isaiah’s prophecy of the vineyard.

Workers are instrumental, the slaughter oxen instrumentally feed Elisha’s community.

But this instrumentalism, this ethical and strategic consequentialism, is mooted in Jesus’ paradigm and symbolism which is ethical in the way of shalom and grace-making alone.

Jesus is not strategically constructing, absent any fox's hole or a nest.

He is not concerned with some putative human natural law of strategic security and differential protection of self or progeny.

Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

“Looking rearward” is to compare yourself to others— the least theologically and ethically effective (“FIT”) activity imaginable. Consider animals in nature.

Do they regard others competitively? Enviously? Conventionally? Comparatively? Which is “natural”—that problematic word when applied to ALL humans as God’s imagers?

Our antagonistic culture leads us to expect instant impact, our ministries going viral is the test and BRAND of someone’s potential and power.  

The temptation to let our work be branded and thus by the capitalist notion of ministry as product —marketable, consumable, and lucrative.

Of one’s ministry curated to draw a certain kind of attention (social media clicks) interpreted as cultural influence.

 Its wake, its diggings, its too-often fracking.

But this branding is all noise external to the kingdom of care itself which is quiet and companionable, humble and welcoming.

     Take shalom’s long view.

Turn down the noise.

Sail to the mark.

Regard the real and attend not to the virtual:

the algorithms and aesthetics of conventions of consequential impact that exclude in the name of competition.

Our bulletin quote this morning from Kierkegaard calls our attention to the fact that the greater and harder point of life is to change what is inside of us,

not what is outside of us, which is the development of the socially calming virtues rather than the development of what is impossible:

a consequentialist program of strategic intellect to determine the future.

While strategic rationality proposes that for every natural cause there is a natural effect, such an approach to guiding both society and mission gets bogged down in human finiteness, limitation of knowledge of future sequences and cascades of effects from emerging information,  the meaning of “natural” and the role of chance,  and, for those of us who know God, the radical redirections of salvation and grace on reshaping our human freedom:

our individual efforts and intentions redirected by repentence and spirit.

Consequentialism as a program for ethical, political, and cognitive rationality goes off the rails after a few predictions.

 That’s why so many people are rightly concerned with turning over management of complex systems to the “if then” logic and symbolic mathematics of AI algorithms lacking souls.

It took me a long time to understand that Christ’s theology is about building civilizations of care from the ground up— from the humble perspective of immanent grace— not a strategic program for designing social policy from the top down—from a transcendent view of God’s justice.

This is what taking up the plow means.

It means to be yoked to the community on earth, not peering into the councils of heaven with regards to the unfolding global future.

We leave to God the consequential operation of justice. We don’t look back to see how our plowed actions bear fruit, but continue to focus on our daily routines and tasks, entrusting that if the Holy Spirit has called us, our faithful allegiance to that task will surely bear fruit.

Rather than alerting us solely to the dangers of nostalgia or procrastination,

Luke’s text warns us against developing a consequentialist and strategic rationality as a short cut to (a short-circuit of) the time consuming and arduous practices of virtue and the ethical development of community shalom from the ground up, relying on God for the big picture organization of individual Christian callings to transform the world and its systems.

The transcendent God is calling individual disciples of Christ by the Holy Spirit to plow their own fields.

 There will be others following later (even generationally) to seed, to weed, and to harvest.

 Let’s not look back.

 Let’s keep our small teams moving forward by keeping our eyes on the captain and perfecter of our faith, Jesus Christ. May it be so for you and me. AMEN.