The mule stood there, looking back at me with almost aggressive disinterest, dismissively swishing his tail. He was standing in front of a large iron plough, the kind used by farmers in the 19th century, and he was wearing a harness that hitched him to the plough in order to pull it. I looked back at the mule, not at all convinced that this was going to actually happen, much less go well. I was standing in a field that was part of one of those “living history villages,” where volunteers or workers dress up in period costumes and play a particular character in the village, staying in character all day as they interact with both each other and the visitors.
At this point, I can’t honestly remember where this village was, 
but it was somewhere in Virginia where I had stopped as part of a larger driving vacation through the region. The village had the usual sorts of “stations,” for lack of a better word: a blacksmith, a butter-churner, a weaver, a doctor, and…a farmer.
What was theoretically great about the visiting the farmer was that you got to actually try ploughing a row in a field in which vegetables could then be planted. In hindsight, this seems only slightly more safe that allowing visitors to try their hand at the blacksmith forge, because both the mule and the plough were very large, very heavy and neither seemed particularly willing to follow directions.
To be fair, the farmer was standing close to the mule’s head with a hand on the bridle, but the plough just had those two handles on either side of it with which I was supposed to steer it. As I stepped up to the plough the mule turned his head away and looked forward, clearly unimpressed but resigned to the inevitable, as I grasped the handles. “Ready?” the farmer asked. “I guess,” I replied, knowing that I had no idea what that really meant. But then the farmer said, “ge’up!” and the mule actually started moving forward at a deliberate pace in a straight line, and the plough followed him, so I did, too. And it was working!
The blade of the plough bit into the earth surprisingly smoothly and began digging a furrow as I walked behind point it forward. After a few yards, someone in the small crowd watching behind me said, “hey, he’s doing it!” and I instinctively turned to smile back at them. But when I did, I dipped my left hand down as I turned, and the plough immediately went off at a 45 degree angle.
I quickly turned around and steered it back towards the furrow, but of course I didn’t quite straighten it out in time, so then I had to bring it back to the left again, and what had been a nice straight furrow now looked as if a drunken mole had been burrowing a series of squiggles in the field. “Whoa” the farmer said, and looked back at me with a grin. “Sensitive steering, isn’t it?” he said, as if we were talking about a sports car instead of a plough. But he was right; just a momentary loss of concentration and focus had ruined the nice, neat furrow I had been digging.
“No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” Jesus says at the end of our reading today, the last of several comments he makes here that can sound pretty insensitive or even offensive to our ears. We generally hear “Don’t look back” through the filer of the tired trope in movies and love songs and self-help quotes: “never look back, always look forward;” “don’t look back, nothing ever changes there”; “don’t look back unless it’s to see how far you’ve come.”
But that’s not really what Jesus is talking about. It’s not that some version of “don’t look back, look ahead” isn’t relevant here, but it’s not the actual point he’s making, either. The point he’s making is in that image of the plough: it’s about the need for single-minded focus and concentration: if you’re ploughing and you look back, you’re going to ruin the furrow you’re trying to make that will allow the seeds intended for it to grow and flourish.
That’s actually more challenging, I think, than reading this as just Jesus being pretty insensitive to people’s other legitimate concerns, because the whole idea of single-minded focus on pretty much anything is almost anathema in our culture today. Despite the overwhelming evidence of numerous studies that it is counterproductive, “multitasking” is an almost universal professional practice and expectation, as workers juggle multiple unrelated conversations with their colleagues over email along with time-sensitive deliverables and longer-term planning, all at the same time.
Parents at home are doing laundry, monitoring children’s homework, and preparing dinner all at the same time, often while continuing to respond to text messages and emails as they do so. Just having a smartphone means that you spend far more time multitasking than anybody did before the mid-2000s when they were first created and sold, because every spare moment that involves waiting for something often gets filled by checking or sending messages, looking up things on the internet, or scrolling through social media. Is it any wonder that one of the most common complaints people have about their lives these days is how busy they are, how many different directions they’re getting pulled in or having to head in? If we were all steering ploughs, most people’s furrows wouldn’t just be crooked, but look like some kind of scribble in the earth from a giant pencil.
People in the first century certainly didn’t have the volume of opportunities to compete for their attention that we have, but Jesus is still calling for a radical focus and commitment from those who seek to follow him. “I will follow you wherever you go,” one person tells him. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus replies.
He’s essentially warning this would-be follower that “wherever he goes” is not going to be a luxurious or even comfortable trip. Jerusalem may be the “big city” in the minds of Galileans, but Jesus knows he will not be welcomed into people’s homes there; he knows that what lies in wait for his is conflict and rejection and pain and death, and that anyone who follows him will be in for much of the same. That’s a reasonable enough response; he wants to make sure that those who are following him know what they’re getting into.
The ones that follow, though, sound demanding to the point of almost cruelty. He turns to one and says, “follow me,” and the man says, “first let me bury my father.” Now, that’s about as good a reason for delay as there could possibly be. This man’s father has just died, and Jesus is telling him to let others take care of the burial, but he should “go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” In our culture, that sounds bad, but it’s hard to overstate the magnitude of what Jesus is telling this man in first century Jewish culture.
Judaism, to be blunt, is far better about dealing with grief than Christianity has historically been; there are expectations and requirements of family members when someone dies. You don’t just have to bury the person who has died; you have to wash the body completely and dress it in simple burial shrouds. But it’s not just that; traditionally, Jewish people watch over the body until the burial, and then have a period of mourning for seven days known as “sitting Shiva,” in which the close family remains together and other family members and friends come through to sit with them and provide them with food so they don’t have to worry about that. All of this is not only a healthy way to grieve, but an important way of honoring the person who has died. And Jesus is still telling this man to abandon those responsibilities to his father and go out and proclaim the gospel.
The final person promises to follow Jesus as soon as he can say goodbye to his family. I mean, how long could that take, really? Even the most drawn-out and dramatic farewell could have only cost a few hours of time, but Jesus tells him that’s still too much. It’s this person who provokes Jesus to say, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Even this social grace is too distracting, Jesus is saying; it will throw you off track in terms of following me.
Jesus is giving a mule a run for its money in terms of stubbornness; here he has people who want to follow him and just need to take care of a few pretty reasonable personal things, but he digs in and tells them they have to drop everything and follow him immediately if they’re going to follow him at all. But it is not simply stubbornness that is motivating him. Jesus has “set his face to go to Jerusalem,” which is an unswerving commitment to his great purpose: to conquer sin and death through his death and resurrection.
Anything, literally anything else, that threatens to turn his face from that purpose has to be resisted, because that is what he has to do. What he’s really asking those who want to follow him, then, is no less than what he’s committed to himself, but that, of course is the challenge. Those potential disciples, no less than us, are drawn to the temptation of multitasking, to trying to fulfill competing responsibilities at the same time, and therefore not giving any of them the attention that they deserve.
When I was in college, my parents arranged for me to take a battery of aptitude tests by an organization called the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation as a way of helping me discern what my “purpose” might be in life, though we didn’t really use that language. But what was interesting about this foundation was that they did not administer a personality inventory like the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram tests do, to help you understand how your personality draws you towards certain behaviors and interactions and leads you away from others.
Nor did it catalogue your interests, the things that you like to do or that draw your attention or passion. Instead, it used a scientific approach to measure aptitudes, meaning tests that had been developed to evaluate what your greatest innate strengths and abilities are, to help you then choose a career or life path that made the best use of those aptitudes.
When I got my results back and they began interpreting them for me, they said one of my challenges was that I had a set of aptitudes in different areas that would be hard to collect into a single job, and so I would either need to find a profession that required an unusual breadth of aptitudes or find other ways to use the ones that my job didn’t utilize, or I would have trouble being satisfied. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the things I love most about pastoral ministry is the wide and very different set of responsibilities it requires, from sermon-writing to administration to teaching to pastoral care!).
But the administrator also said something very interesting to me in the midst of that. He said that if I ended up in a position where I was managing other people, I needed to remember something. “The best managers have no discernable aptitudes,” he said, which made me laugh, because it sounded like some satire of corporate America, but then he said, “no, I’m serious. Managers with strong aptitudes in something then try to do that work themselves instead of letting their employees do it; that’s where micromanaging comes from. Managers without strong aptitudes don’t get distracted trying to fulfill their own needs; they find it much easier to focus completely on what their job really is, which bringing out the best in their employees’ own work.”
The real challenge of Christianity is not one of belief. Beliefs are just a set of ideas, and while I do believe (pun intended) that beliefs are very important, they are important because of what they do to us and for us: how they influence our expectations, our commitments, and our actions. In the Christian faith, we have a word for the intertwining of belief and expectation and commitment and action: discipleship.
We don’t simply have faith, we live it out; we don’t simply believe in Jesus, we follow him; and it is in following that we connect the dots between what God has already done for us through Jesus and what God is up to even now and in the future of this world. As disciples, we don’t simply check off our agreement with a set of ideas about Jesus: we strive to imitate Jesus in our lives and in our collective ministry; we strive to follow his will, not simply our own, as we do so; we strive to lives together in mutual love as a community of disciples in a way that others can look at us and say, “there’s something happening between them that I want to be a part of; that I need to be a part of.”
And to do that requires a singular and total kind of focus, a filter through which all our thoughts, all our actions, all our words, all our commitments must pass. But doing that also produces a singular and total kind of blessing, the fulfillment of our highest calling and purpose as human beings: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, all our mind; and to love our neighbors as ourselves, as both Jesus and the Old Testament put it.
That is what it means to be not simply “saved” as a one-time event, like changing your relationship status on social media, but to receive the blessing of eternal life starting right here, right now, because to fulfill that calling involves both an eternity of God’s love and grace and an eternity of our living faithfully both through that and in response to it. And if we give our response to that blessing and that calling our full and constant attention, then the furrows we till will be straight, or at least straight enough, and the seeds we plant will be fruitful, because God’s abundant grace is constant and overflowing.