God is My Flight Attendant

“Yo, J – your mother and your brothers want to talk with you.”

“Tell ‘em ‘Later’. I’m busy with you; you’re my mother and my brothers.”

 Sounds troubling, like this “J” is dissin’ his mother.  More troubling – “J” is Jesus, and the exchange comes from Matthew’s Gospel, at the end of Chapter 12.  A good friend, a man that I admire as an example of kindness and passion for humanity, finds this a barrier to following Jesus.  Who the heck would slam the door on his mother because of his “public?”  This week’s Gospel, it’s Luke, another evangelist, who quotes “J”: "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”  I hear Ronald Reagan saying “Well, there you go again, Jesus

, putting your work before your mother.” 

I’m blessed with the opportunity to meet with a small group of men on Tuesday mornings here, guys from the parish, to look at the coming Sunday’s gospel, to discuss it and pray together.  For 35 years I was blessed with that opportunity in Detroit, with a series of good men, men like my brothers, who knew me better than my own mother.  We were guys with old houses that always needed repair.  We always had some project or other going on.  Some of them were grand visions.  And so the second part of Luke’s Chapter 14 story struck me too.  The man who starts a project before having all of his materials is a goofball.  When he has to stop the job unfinished for lack of all that was needed, he’ll be a laughingstock. 

I told the guys I really needed to listen to them, that this turning away from family to follow our faith was troubling to me.  And I listened as they each shared what was on their hearts, or in their minds.  My mind was racing.  By the time the seven of them had spoken, I wanted to be able to toss in my own thoughts.  But I was caught on the turning away from family to follow.

Then it hit me: the instructions of the flight attendant.  Put your own mask on first.  If we were on a plane and suddenly it started to lose altitude quickly and oxygen masks fell down toward us, I guarantee I’d be looking at Kathy, and if our kids were with us, I’d be looking to see that they were all OK.  So the instructions of the flight attendant are counterintuitive, just as this Gospel.  If we try to help those we love without air, we’ll die and do nothing for them.  They will lose us.  In a world with so much distraction, where there is so much momentum for selfishness and individualism, we’ll suffocate unless we follow Jesus – and our project will go unfinished.

“J” wasn’t dissin’ his mother.  Jesus isn’t telling us to be cold followers.  This Gospel just tells us not to overestimate our ability to do anything for anyone using only what we have.  He’s up in the front of the plane, miming with the oxygen mask as if it had fallen from the ceiling as the recorded message plays on the plane’s sound system.  He’s pulling on the thin white strap as if to tighten it on his face, looking at our faces to see if we’re paying attention to something that will save our lives – and our mothers’ and our brothers’ and sisters’ and kids’ and friends’: “place your own mask and secure it before assisting others.”

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.