Canter Bridge

Jesus must have known his words would be overlaid upon the landscape of life like a template, checked for accuracy, doubted in anguished fashion, and celebrated when they seemed to describe the ironic intricacies of life more exactly than any others:

Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’

Jesus counterposes two realities to the experienced pain of loss. First, he promises a lavish return on investment in this life, though on another plane than that which absorbed the disciples’ voluntary losses. That is, the follower of Jesus will experience abundance and a reconstituted family embrace in this life. He may not own title to the abundance he enjoys. His new family members may be joined to him and to each other by spiritual rather than blood bonds.

Yet wealthy and warm it will be.

Second, Jesus envisages a kind of culmination of these bounties in ‘the age to come’. It seems that he expects circumstances in this life to point towards an intensified version of their goodness in an age to come that will be both very different than and quite similar to this world here below.

Jesus then colors this description with two stark observations. First, these good things will come, perhaps unexpectedly, with ‘persecutions’. His promise is not an unmitigated paradise. Far from it, he paints a landscape of experience wherein the hills and gardens are interrupted and framed by the severest melancholies. Life comes at one in full color. The palette includes blood red.

Finally, Jesus’ punctuates this odd teaching with a comment that leads the hearer to doubt his capacity to predict, manage, or otherwise tidy up the life to which Jesus has called him. The remarkable observation that ‘many who are first will be last, and the last will be first’ takes one’s hands—schooled as they are in this world’s logic, this world’s cause and effect—off the levers.

In a world like the one Jesus describes, one can only choose to embrace its Lord, obey his instructions, and await what comes with the expectation that the outcome will be, well, unexpected.

One does not rule in a world like this. Someone else does.