Whenever I am disappointed, whether it’s with a friend, an event or how a day has turned out, I ask myself, “What were you expecting? And why?” Because that’s usually the source of my disappointment: somehow reality didn’t match my picture of how it “ought” to be. My narrow self-identity has walled me off from God’s astonishing diversity.
Separating wants and needs can be a useful tool for self-knowledge. When my expectation is fairness or justice, I need to hold onto how the laws should be applied or how our social patterns need to change. But when my assumption is about how someone else should behave, I often find that my expectations are simply an unconscious desire or my convenience. “What were you expecting?” becomes a useful tool for digging up my wants and noticing my needs.
Jesus puts it more strongly in the gospel for this week: To become a disciple, you must “hate” your family, your tribe, your people.* That is, you must relinquish your tribal identity in order to embrace God’s call. In this era of so-called Christian Nationalism, those are strong words in the opposite direction: to be a disciple, we must let go of tribal identity for a bigger purpose.
Then Jesus adds two curious examples. One is a contractor, who counts the cost of a project before starting it. The other is a king who chooses to surrender when greatly outnumbered on the battlefield. Both suggest intention and self-evaluation.
I suspect that many of my expectations arise from unconscious class or gender assumptions, and the inner work of becoming a disciple requires that I become conscious of those biases. Clearing that inner space means that I can expand the circle of my loving beyond people who are like me and my biological family AND that I can receive love from people unlike myself.
In the end, his message is not about hating at all, but about making space for love.
-Marjory Z. Bankson, Editor of InwardOutward
- How do you track disappointments or regrets? How do you explore those feelings?
- When have you relinquished a group identity to make space for something more?
- What is a challenge that you face in our political environment today?
