[I’m on vacation for the month of July. But I’m still blogging. This isn’t a sermon or a reflection I’ve written with anyone in mind. Just thoughts that happen alongside the lectionary.]
I am the parent of a teen and a preteen. Their whole lives are comparison. The daily grind of comparing themselves to peers, to the abstract idea of “people my age”, even to the weird concept we call “adulthood” is excruciating.
Parents, of course, do it too. When a parent hears another parent, they shift into comparison mode. Go ahead and nod knowingly.
There is no rest in comparison. No freedom, either. When it is active, we are its prisoners.
It feels normal. Not right exactly, but natural.
And yet also guilt-inducing. Like we we shouldn’t.
Normal/wrong, good/bad, true/distortion.
There is no “true” parent. No virtue in comparison beyond the acquisition of knowledge for support.
And yet, when we see young kids playing outside of a Sonic, we do think “I remember those days.”
Trying to get away
Jesus tries to get away, but can’t. Not fully. No real break.
Instead, he imposes a physical separation.
This follows a season of physical exploitation. People grabbing and straining for him. Needing him, demanding he help them. These demands aren’t easily borne (or rejected). Not by someone so opposed to selfish satisfaction as Jesus.
I’m not sure we take this idea well enough. Perhaps our own need to compare gets in the way.
He can’t even break to eat. Pray. No getting away.
Only bodies—always demanding, pulling, shoving, trampling others to get to him.
Jesus does the only thing he can do—acknowledge their need and his own.
He makes himself physically separated from them while continuing to serve them. Until he can get away altogether.
He creates boundaries for everyone’s sake.
This week’s contrast
Jesus’s distancing happens with a teaching built around comparison. Not just between different types of soil, but people. We nearly always miss this act of distancing, however.
We read this and compare ourselves. To the idealized “good soil” and to each other.
Some are so eager to be the good soil that they will destroy those around them. It is hard to see the so-called culture war as “good soil”, for example.
There’s something lost for us when we jump to comparison. Any attempt to be the good soil that condemns, rejects, or simply evaluates others.
It is as if we become these crowds. No sense of boundaries or patience. Hope or generosity. Selfish and demanding. Certain and right.
And here is Jesus—just trying to eat a granola bar. No time for Applebee’s. Can’t even get a sandwich delivered. Always more desire. Need.
No time.
Need that comes from an absence of grace. Not because God doesn’t offer it. But because we reject it for the desire to be right.
Hunger disowned
Our needs are not built around lack.
We see our lives according to the binary: a scale of abundance versus lack. And we generally impose that into another binary of my lack versus your abundance. Comparison.
These are false narratives we offer ourselves and each other—constraining our common hopes. Isolating each of us from one another. Perceiving need as something separate from community.
Lack isn’t a comparison measure, because the purpose of life is wholeness. Not either/or; all of the things coming together.
Our brains disown their real hunger.
Our hungers and desires come, not from absence so much as rejection of self. Our needs may be plentiful, but are never sated.
Psychologists refer to this as hedonic adaptation. And it is the reason you get bored with the presents you wanted so badly as a kid. Why you can make twice as much money and still feel broke. And why you can feel profoundly lonely, even when you have more friends than ever.
And we miss our true desires.
Not because we intend to. Or because we’re somehow broken. But because we’re designed that way. And we don’t know how else to do it.
We can feel lonely in a crowd. And we can be satisfied alone. Just as we can feel a part of something big with other people or isolated by ourselves.
This isn’t a mindset problem exactly. Because our loneliness isn’t based on having people near us. And it isn’t entirely explained by our family systems, either. We can’t psychoanalyze our way to joy.
Not until we get to the root of what makes our brain happy about feeling lonely. Not until we realize the source of our need.
Comparison is a dead end, not a short cut.
We think we’re supposed to do it. Heck, Jesus does it to compare different kinds of soil. A proverbial “what not to do.” But he doesn’t say any of these is you. Or the person next to you.
This isn’t a key for looking at the world to solve your own insecurity in faith.
Worrying about what your friends are doing, what a sticker might say about you, what tribe we belong to… Junk. All of it. It doesn’t make us better.
Comparing yourself to other parents, kids, teachers, students, writers, speakers is a dead end. Only it isn’t marked. And you think it’s a short cut.
It is fool’s gold. The get-rich-quick scheme that yields only disappointment; for you or the person you exploit.
Being ourselves, following a Way of Love, trying to be as honest as possible. That’s the long way. And it makes middle school a lot harder. Heck, it makes life a lot harder. But the alternative: misery masquerading as joy. Sickness we treat like healthcare.
Bet on hope. And live anyway.