Well, isn't this just the usual way of "normalizing" Luke and the Gospels. It is neat how the dear Father serves his function by soothing our guilt for actually living (or wanting to live) normal lives with family and friends, instead of obeying the urgency of the Gospels and dropping everything, ignoring all kinship and community ties, to work toward the coming end of time (or imminent revolution if you happen to be a nutty Maoist-Avakian). In the way of Fr. Francis our little middle class world view can be made to conform with the very strange, usually frightening, often generous and the totalistic (if not totalitarian) values that actually motivated the New Testament writers, in their lived-experience of eschata and their shivers of chiliastic hopes. Fr. Francis, needs to explain this passage in the way he does so that early Christianity can be blotted out and the written evidence can conform with current ideals of "family values." In so doing his little homily pulls Luke out of historical context.
Early Christians were great dividers of families and kinship groups. The world hoped for, and represented in the Gospels, did not conform to current ideals of "family values." It is not only the few who are called from the family in order to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and his apostles but everyone who wants to survive the soon to come end-times. The good news of Luke is that the world is going to end, boys and girls, and the Kingdom of God shall reign on earth, and those who know best should break all the normal ties of kinship, community, property in land, livestock, and slaves, leave behind their old oppressive ways of relating to wife and husband, father, son, daughter, and live the Christian way of life. Now! Soon, very soon, the Kingdom will come, and all shilly-shallying is either hypocrisy or wishful thinking.
This is the "historical" view of Luke, and Fr. Francis' explication of the passages where the gospel writer puts into Jesus' mouth words meant to divide children from filial and familial piety, only seeks to explain away such passages for the comfort and benefit of his modern followers.
Perhaps we should be grateful to the likes of Fr. Francis for normalizing Luke. After all the true spirit of those early Christian writings are simply too extreme and at times radical, too fundamentalist and at times fundamental, and certainly little of it has anything to do with capitalism or normal family life. All of my Jesuit teachers would good "Death of God" theologians and they taught me well that there is very little in the New Testament that can actually conform to our hopes for a "normal" life or even capitalist self-interest. So excuse this little bit of a religious tirade from this Jesuitical atheist.
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