BE TRUE TO THE ONE TASK
Author: Fr. Mike Byron
June 30, 2019
I’m sure
that the word “multi-task” did not exist 50 years ago in common speech. For a whole lot of reasons, “multi-tasking”
was simply not possible for most people before that. (I guess the big exception to that would be
parenting). Today it is possible to be
occupied by many things at the same time. I can be on my laptop and on the phone simultaneously. I can text while I drive (Don’t do that,
please!) I can be in a meeting while
checking my email. I can be cooking a
meal while watching the news on TV. It’s
all very efficient—and stressful. And
for the most part we tend to regard the ability to multi-task as a good thing.
It’s not
necessarily so. When I was a kid my
parents would occasionally take a vacation together in a far-away place. They would leave the six of us children with
a babysitter for 10 days or so and disappear. We knew where they were and how to find them in an emergency, but we
never heard from them—because the effort to communicate was so enormous. Their task on vacation was to relax,
together—to be away. They usually were
already home again before their postcards arrived in the mail.
Can you
imagine that happening today? Now people
get to be on “vacation” and keep up with voicemail and take care of that
project at work and return that phone call,
AND, AND, AND. We get to multi-task
without end. And we are glad about
that. How interesting. And how fragmenting.
The risk in
all this is that we now can easily lose sight of what is truly, singularly
important, and be able to distinguish that from all the rest of it. It’s relatively easy to lose focus, to forget
priorities. The multi-tasker is very
often the person who accomplishes so much so well, but who can’t remember which
thing really matters and why. And there
are plenty of people out there in our multi-tasking world who will be happy to
tell us what is the most important thing to attend to right now if we don’t
seem to be sure about that.
All of which
is to bring us back to Jesus in today’s gospel of Luke. This Jesus is not a multi-tasker, and in fact
he seems to be impatient with those who try to be. The section of the gospel that we just heard
is the pivotal moment in the whole story. It starts a section of Luke that is 10 chapters long, and that we will
be reading every weekend here in church until November 3. If you recall, the gospel today began this
way: “When the days for Jesus’ being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely
determined to journey to Jerusalem.” The
journey to his fate—his passion, death, and resurrection. The journey. This is, from now on, his singular task—as it is for any who would dare
to come along with him. And for all of
the people he will meet along the way, for all of the opportunities he will
have to teach and preach and heal, none of that will be allowed to distract or
impede him from the one task that moves him onward: The procession to Jerusalem.
His first
stop, we are told, was to be in Samaria. But he wasn’t welcomed there. So
James and John asked about starting a fight about that. “Should we call down fire from heaven to teach
them a lesson?” They asked. Shall we add this task to our list? And Jesus said no, just keep moving on the
journey. That is our only task; the rest
is distraction. We are not here to
multi-task. We must be on the move.
And then
Jesus encounters 3 different individuals along the way, all of them would-be
followers on the journey. The first
promises to follow on the journey wherever it may lead, and Jesus’ response is
to say “you’d better be sure about that.” There had better not be anything else in the way. A second is a multi-tasker, who want’s both
to join the journey and to bury his father. Both are noble and sacred tasks, Jesus knows, but you have to be ready
to pick one of them. “Let the dead bury
their dead,” he says. It sounds harsh,
but that is not our task here.
And the
third man is in the same condition, wishing both to follow Jesus and to say
farewell to his family. And the answer
is the same: No multi-tasking here, no
delays, no other commitments—no matter how good and reasonable they may seem.
Many or most
of us have the luxury of having it both ways a lot of the time—i.e. we can get
away with multi-tasking for a while. We
can both strive to follow Jesus on his paschal journey and attend to many other
things that seem good and deserving of our interest and passion. But we had better be very clear about which
task has absolute priority, because the time will come when we will be made to
choose—when it’s going to boil down to following him to the cross or to be busy
about something else, even something else that can look so benign.
The gospel
in the end, is not for multi-taskers. It
is for those who are focused on the one task that matters—following Jesus to
Jerusalem, unimpeded by any other task.
For us
shocking as these examples may seem to us today—honoring dead parents and
taking leave of family—they would have been even more shocking to Jews of
Jesus’ day. Clearly he intended to be
dramatic and blunt. Family obligations
were nearly absolute and sacred, but not as important as this.
Are we ready
to set aside all those other tasks for the sake of the one? Tasks like making money? Being safe? Keeping a job? Having
friends? Playing sports? Living in peace? Having a home? Getting ahead? Enjoying a reputation? Having fun? None of those tasks are necessarily bad or wrong, but they are not the
one that matters.
Today and
every day at Eucharist we remember again what is that one; the journey to
Jerusalem.
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