I hesitated before striking the match.
I was standing by the firepit in a friends’ back yard. In the firepit there was an untidy pile of photos and journals and a few other flammable mementos from a particularly dark chapter in my life. The chapter had come to a close, but I still carried the remnants with me—both figuratively and literally. And as long as I held onto these physical reminders, they kept drawing my gaze back to the past.
So my friend recommended burning them as a symbolic act of catharsis, releasing the past and purging myself of the pain. I have to admit I was skeptical. It felt more than a little hokey. But I was willing to try it because I didn’t want to carry the weight of that past life with me anymore. I wanted to leave it behind. I wanted to be free.
But I hesitated before striking the match, because in that moment I felt the weight of leaving the past behind. If I struck this match, there would be no going back. The remnants that kept me yoked to the past would go up in flames and be gone forever. And as awful as that past had been, it was familiar, and destroying these mementos meant I could never look back in quite the same way. So, I hesitated, unsure if I was ready to make the choice to walk away—if I was entirely willing to leave that life behind. But in the end, I made the choice and struck the match and turned the tokens of my past life into a bonfire. And I did feel a kind of release—a kind of freedom.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” Paul reminds his foolish Galatians. But living into this freedom requires a radical change as significant—maybe more significant than striking the match to burn the mementos of the past.
Our Gospel reading today groups together several short, somewhat cryptic exchanges between Jesus and would-be disciples. These may not have occurred all in a row. But Luke groups them together, because they all express the stakes—the finality—of the decision to follow Jesus into the freedom of his Kingdom.
To the man who says, “I will follow you wherever you go,” Jesus answers, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” This speaks to the vulnerability—the utter dependence on God’s provision—that disciples of Jesus must be willing to embrace.
When a grieving man asks to bury his deceased father before embarking on a life of discipleship, Jesus urges him, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” And while this might sound like hard-hearted callousness on Jesus’ part, I think it better to receive it as a stark and startling reminder of just how urgent Christ’s mission of reconciliation is—just how pressing the work before us as Christ’s followers is.
And it’s that work—that mission—that Jesus is talking about when he warns against looking back after “putting a hand to the plough.” It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But living into that freedom means answering Jesus’ summons, fixing our gaze on the work of reconciliation before us, not looking back to the old life from which he redeems us.
That old life that we—as Jesus’ disciples—cannot afford to be wistfully looking back on is what Paul calls the “yoke of slavery”—the burden of the past that Christ sets us free from. But this freedom isn’t autonomy to do whatever we want. Christ does not set us free to live by and for ourselves, chasing our own agendas and indulging our own desires.
Paul reminds us of this in a very evocative way when he tells the Galatians to become “slaves to one another through love.” Christ removes the yoke of slavery to sin so that we can be free to yoke ourselves to one another. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free—free to be in bondage by love to one another.
Christ redeems us and calls us to leave behind our old life which keeps us trapped in a cycle of “biting, devouring, and consuming one another.” (And if you doubt that that’s the life we’ve been trapped in, I’d refer you to any news outlet out there.) We are freed from this slavery to the law of sin and death—freed, instead, to bind ourselves together under God’s law—the law summed up in that single commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Christ frees us to leave behind our desire for power and control, and he summons us instead to become obedient to love in the most radical sense.
We see all of this—the urgency of the summons, the impossibility of looking back, the cost of living out the freedom God offers—we see it all play out in our first reading today. Elijah has been through a whole heck of a lot in his ministry as God’s prophet. He’s fled murderous kings and queens and faced death by starvation in the wilderness. He’s been rescued by angels, and he’s encountered God in the sound of sheer silence. And now he learns that it’s time for him to call a disciple—a successor who can continue his mission of pointing people back to God.
So, Elijah goes, following God’s instructions, and he finds this kid Elisha, ploughing a field with twelve yoke of oxen. The prophet throws his cloak over the farmboy, calling him away from his life of working the fields by literally passing his mantle on to him. And recognizing the gesture as a summons from God, Elisha willingly answers the call.
But Elisha doesn’t just leave his old life behind. He dismantles it. He slaughters the oxen. He breaks down the wooden yoke and plough. And he sets it all on fire and makes a sacrifice of it. Elisha feeds his community with the remnants of the life he’s leaving behind. And in doing so, he removes even the possibility of turning back. He doesn’t hedge his bets. He doesn’t keep a door open. He doesn’t store the yoke in the barn just in case. He answers God’s summons with his whole self, striking the match and walking forward in faith.
Elisha shows us what it looks like to live into the freedom that Christ has won for us—to walk out from under the old yoke of slavery to ego, control, and fear; and to shoulder instead the yoke of slavery to love of God and our neighbor, with gaze fixed on the work of proclaiming God’s reign. Elisha shows us what it looks like to burn what binds us to the past—not out of bitterness, but out of hope—to surrender the tools of the old life in order to walk freely into the new one.
Now, Elisha’s choice unfolds in just a couple of verses. In classic biblical fashion, the text moves quickly, without much internal dialogue, inviting us into a dance of prayerful imagination. And obviously those photos and journals that I burned in my friend’s firepit are nothing compared to what Elisha was leaving behind. But I can’t help but wonder if he, too, paused for a moment… I wonder if maybe, before striking the match, he stood there in silence, looking at the pile of yokes and ploughs, and feeling the weight of what it would mean to let his past life go for good. Maybe he hesitated, like I did. Like many of us do in the face of Jesus’ call to be his disciples.
Because discipleship—really following Jesus—costs something. Answering Jesus’s call into new life requires a radical change. It requires us to leave behind the life of sin—the life of laboring in service to sin—seeking self-indulgence, power, and control for ourselves. And it’s not always easy to let go of that yoke of slavery to sin, even when we know that what lies ahead is the freedom of being yoked to one another in love. Some of us (myself included) spend years standing there, match in hand, unsure if we’re ready to let it all go—to leave it all behind—to answer Christ’s call and follow him.
If that’s where you find yourself today, take heart: Our Lord is summoning us, calling us to an urgent and pressing mission, like he called Elisha and all the disciples—calling us to leave behind the yoke of slavery to sin and take up his yoke—the yoke of slavery to love. And answering that call is a tall order. But the same Lord who issues that summons is patient and kind, and he never tires of calling us, again and again, until we are ready to answer—until we are ready to leave it all behind and follow him into new life.
So, if today you hear his voice calling and you’re ready, then strike the match. Set it all on fire. And walk forward into the freedom that God has prepared for you.