Keep ploughing on

For my daily Bible reading I tend to follow the Lectionary (a series of daily Bible readings used by much of the Protestant Church.) Today’s readings included a passage from Luke’s Gospel Luke 9: 57 - 62. The passage finds Jesus giving advice to those would seek to follow him.

57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
58 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
59 He said to another man, “Follow me.”
But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”
62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

In some translations of the Bible the passage is headed “The cost of following Jesus”. The verses are not comforting words. They are a reminder that if we wish to be followers of Jesus, at times we must make hard choices.

One verse jumped out at me this morning. Verse 62.

I read this verse as Jesus saying that to be a follower, we must look at what lies ahead (Jesus, and his Kingdom.) If we keep looking back there is a danger that we won’t keep our focus on Jesus. We could become distracted.

(By the way, I’ve listened to enough editions of The Archers to know that someone skilled with the plough looks ahead in order to plough a straight furrow.)
Reading this verse this morning made me think about how over the last year I’ve been looking back to 2nd September 2016 (the day I was taken ill) and the following months in hospital. The verse seemed to suggest this was a bad thing.

As it happened, I had a visit today from a wise friend. I shared this with him and he had a different take on things. He pointed that in our lives there is often a Before and After. It is natural for us to reference such things. And very often the After is very different than the Before
Ploughing on

For me, the After is post my illness and surgery. But for others it could be After the birth of a child. It could be After the death of a loved one. It could be After a marriage. It could be After a divorce. Life will be different After because the event happened.

My wise friend asked if a I knew a poem by U. A. Fanshaw called “BC:AD”. I know it well and have used it many times in Advent and Christmas services. I do not have permission to reproduce it here but Google it.

The poem reminds us that after the birth of Jesus Christ the world changed. “This was the moment when Before Turned into After” Fanshaw writes. (BC – before Christ became AD – Anno Domini ‘in the year of our Lord’.)

My friend was helping me to see that we all have reference points and we will all have a Before and After. (We may well have a number of such memorable events.) There is no harm in remembering life Before but we need to live in the After (and look to the Future too.) Living in the After will be different to the Before of course.
In fact, living in the Before can be emotionally dangerous. For example, following a bereavement there can be a tendency to look back at what was and this can be damaging emotionally.

A few years ago, the place where I was working brought in a “Motivational Speaker” as part of a management team building exercise. When I read the “invitation” to this event my heart sank – especially when I Googled the speaker and saw a really cheesy photo of him presenting.

But I was wrong and that session with Nigel Risner, well over 10 years ago, has stayed with me. One thing he said was “The past is a place of reference not a place of residence.” (The quotation is attributed to various people but I had not heard it until Nigel Risner mentioned it.)

In other words, it is OK to look back at what has been but we must not become fixated upon it. We can learn from it. We can look back fondly (or not) but we must not remain there. We need to live in the present all the while looking forward.

Often, we use the phrase “to plough on” in the sense of toiling on or plodding on. But referring back to my Bible quotation I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. He seems to suggest that ploughing is a worthwhile exercise, a rewarding exercise, as long as we keep focused on him and what lies ahead with him. It is only when we look back that our ploughing goes adrift.