Save the Last Kiss for God
1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62
At St. John of the Cross Minor Seminary, Nsukka, Bishop Godfrey Okoye kept changing the rectors of the seminary every year, so goes the story. After a few years, behold the bishop himself visited the seminary and the seminarians made an appeal, in their welcome speech to the bishop, that the appointment of rectors should take into cognizance stability instead of flux; that they hardly get to know and appreciate a rector before he is transferred. Bishop Okoye responded to the seminarians: “no single priest can show you all the faces of God!” One rector shows you the face of a God who loves kids, another a prayerful God, yet another, a sportive and dramatic loving God. Each rector brings on board a distinctive face of God, he said!
We will notice, if we pay attention, that different prophets show us different faces of God, the one God! The subtle transition taking place in today’s first reading comes across from the names of the prophets, one replacing another. Elijah – “my God is Yahweh” or “my God is alive,” hands over the reign of prophetic leadership to Elisha, “my God saves” or “my God is Salvation.” The stories of the tragedies of the priests and prophets of Ba’al and the soldiers who were consumed by fire from above, at the command of Elijah, showed the Israelite God in a different light: he is a God who destroys! This is about to change, with Elisha. Henceforth, God is a God who saves, he stands for the salvation of all. This new face of God – Salvation – resonates well with our contemporaries!
The mere touching or coming in contact with the prophetic mantle of Elijah, Elisha felt the call of God to become a prophet. God uses a medium and circumstance of his choice to reach out to his creatures that we are. And, our creatureliness also manifests itself almost instantaneously in situations like that – protest, because we have our own plans and definition of expediencies and responsibilities! Elisha requests time to go kiss and say goodbye to his family! What a noble thing to do, we would say! But an excuse remains an excuse – the difficulty of saying “yes” to God and bringing inline our plans with God’s purposes for us! Here, at least, the end justifies the means: Elisha gave up his job by sacrificing the source of his livelihood, that is, made sure that nothing kept him back, and followed Elijah! He saved the last kiss for God!
To the naked eye and sluggish mind, the role of the Spirit of God in the drama of Elisha’s vocation might be missed. Some power or force came upon Elisha that convinced him that something was different at his contact with Elijah. This force or power is the Spirit of God present in all those who belong to him. This Spirit is the inner compass or, today, we would say GPS – Global Positioning System. God is above or in heaven, but his Spirit reaches to all his creatures, directing and guiding them towards the realization of his purposes, provided God’s creatures make themselves available for use as God’s instruments.
As human beings, especially in our age of capitalism and pragmatism, we want to be able to plan and foresee our future. This tendency makes faith in God and malleability by the Holy Spirit very difficult. What we cannot see and negotiate with seems non-existent and stupid gambling. But here precisely is the place of the Holy Spirit – fluidity. The Holy Spirit is God’s presence in those who allow themselves to be directed by him. The obstacles in God’s mission for human salvation brings this out clearly. Jesus, on his part, has accepted his role as the Messiah and Saviour of the world. Nonetheless, obstacles were there, mounted by human beings, mounted by the devil. The passage to Jerusalem was being blocked, and Jesus had to reroute his journey through another path. Jesus’s disciples wanted a show of force and power: let us send down fire to consume them! Do you hear the echo of Elijah sending down fire in the voices of James and John? If Jesus were to condemn, his purpose and role as the Saviour will be compromised, he chose to be Elisha – “my God saves!”
The antagonism between the good and the bad, the desire to do good and the temptation to do evil, remain a reality in the daily lives of Christians. If Jesus faced it, we will as well. Every single day and hour, we keep making choices between evil and good. For instance, we decide either to take bribes or reject them; we struggle at looking at men or women lustfully or not; we worry whether God can provide for our present or future needs or not as we face-off with our investments in earthly capital or heavenly reward.
These struggles in themselves simply tell us that God’s Holy Spirit dwells in us directing our choices and struggles. This is the point of Paul, in our second reading today. Paul’s admonition is meant for those who have been justified by God: “I say, then: live by the Spirit and you will certainly not gratify the desire of the flesh. For the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you may not do what you want.” The idea here is a reminder to us that, at Jesus’s baptism, the Holy Spirit came to be Jesus’s GPS or direct relationship with God his Father, just as the same Holy Spirit came upon us at our Baptism and Confirmation for the same purpose.
“Save the last kiss” is an invitation to forgo that which attempts to return and keep us in the past, sinful past; that last temptation and desire of the flesh; that last excuse to do wrong and doubt the power of God’s Spirit to keep us holy and righteous. Save that last kiss and romance with evil and sin and face squarely the call and invitation to holiness! You know, the desire to show your spiritual power is a temptation too! Your holiness of life is not guarantee that no evil will come your way. On the contrary, those events we call evil happenings are our participation in bringing about the salvation of souls.
Assignment for the Week:
For this week, figure out your cardinal vice, and work on its opposite cardinal virtue.