Everything Belongs to God

Notes on the Itinerancy of Jesus

Jesus was itinerant. I don’t think many historians seriously dispute this; I don’t think many theologians do either. It’s right there in the text.

And He said unto them, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor pack, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece (Luke 9:3).

See also Matthew 10:10 (Take no bag for the road, or second tunic, or sandals, or staff) and Mark 6:8-9 (Take nothing for the journey except a staff – no bread, no bag, no money in your belts).

Sometimes folks say that Jesus’ itinerancy was incidental to his message and program. He was poor, yes, but being poor wasn’t the point – it was just a fact of his life and community in that time and place. 

But I think the directive is pretty clear across the gospels and related texts. We are to live our lives in a way that makes clear our acceptance of – indeed, our embrace of – our total dependence on God, materially and spiritually.

Still, what does itinerancy mean in practice? It’s fun to say that we are totally dependent on God but what does it look like in application? 

Most of us push back on a literal reading of those gospel teachings. John Crossan makes a good case that Jesus followers were already watering down Jesus’s radical itinerancy in the first century. No shoes? No food? No coat? That’s dangerous and naive. Maybe I’ll buy a second-hand coat or bear with the hole in my shoe but give it all up? Come on.

Nor has heeding him gotten any easier. We are so much more comfortable than our ancestors; we have a deeper understanding of the natural world and its resources; there are systems in place to protect us – legal, economic, political. The rules have changed! We have houses and yards, Netflix subscriptions, popcorn poppers and air fryers, regularly-scheduled doctor’s visits and gym memberships. We carry phones in our pocket. We take vitamins. 

Who amongst us wants to let that go? Who amongst us should? It’s not like I’m scratching this essay on tissue paper by candlelight.

However, there’s an important subtext to the itinerancy directive of Jesus that can help us discern its application. If you are a wandering pilgrim bearing witness unto God, and you rely on strangers for food and shelter, and if the Kingdom of God really does depend on you wandering in this way, then . . .

 . . . then the Kingdom of God must also depend on folks who will support your wandering. That is, folks who maintain a home, gardens and livestock, clean wells, wine sacks without holes, coats and shoes they can donate, maybe even some spare change.

Nor does it make sense to valorize one role over the other – the wanderer vs. the homesteader. The one supports – indeed, makes possible – the other. Itinerancy is not about being right or even better. It’s about sharing our lives in a deep and sustainable way, always in order to remember the Love and Providence of God.

Deeper than the role of wanderer or homesteader – and deeper than the performance of the role – is an underlying theme that upends easy analysis. Jesus isn’t prioritizing a talent for gardening or a calling to beg. Rather, he’s speaking directly into the very nature of possession and ownership itself. He is counseling us about what – if anything – we are allowed to possess, over and against everyone else with whom we share the world.

And on that view, both the wanderer and the homesteader face the same divine mandate: possess nothing but what you can share with others. And, critically, share with others.

Therefore, also, possess nothing (including pride of self or place or object) that would obstruct or hinder your ability to serve others in this way.

This then is the essence of itinerancy, of a Jesus-informed relationship to ownership: Everything belongs to God, God is right now sharing it all with you and so you – in the spirit of God – are called to share it with others.

This invitation reaches everything – the bread we eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear, the air we breathe, the songs we sing, the stories we tell. Nothing is excluded. If you have it, God gave it to you and invites you to share it as He shares with you. It’s not ambiguous.

Or rather, it’s only ambiguous if you are afraid of what it means to recognize – and relate with one another in and from – our shared total dependence on God.

Abhishiktananda, a Catholic monk who spent decades practicing Advaita Vedanta in India, reached a juncture late in his practice where the itinerancy of Jesus (mirroring as it does the Sanyassin of Hinduism) literally terrified him.

I have understood [the demands of non-possession] too easily as the relative absence of signs of wealth. But it is the very possibility of possession that is attacked . . . There is no longer an ego to be the possessor (Ascent to the Depths of the Heart 383).

The possessions and their absence weren’t the issue; the issue was the very concept of ownership – that I can have what you do not and can, by right, exclude you from it and keep it from you. That’s where the terror comes in. You have to let go of everything – including even your right to hold anything at all in the first place.

Abhishiktananda realized that it was relatively easy to perform poverty and generosity. But the invitation Jesus makes isn’t to a performance but rather to a practice – and that practice requires letting go not only of all our material things but also the very concept of possession at all.

Even for Abhishiktananda, an experienced practitioner of both Catholicism and Advaita, this was profoundly destabilizing. He understood why he and others tended to overlook it, preferring to remain focused on the performance. Itinerancy meant letting go of everything – including the very right to own or possess anything, up to and including life itself. If you go into it, you can appreciate his fear. It’s a big ask – a really big ask. How can we disappear?

Do I think that Jesus was making that kind of argument? About undoing the self? Not explicitly. Jesus was not a mind/body dualist (Abhi kind of was, and A Course in Miracles absolutely is) and so his focus was less on interior transformation than on a collective eschatalogical awakening. There’s a reason the tradition is silent on his transformation from Jesus to Christ (a point to which Abhi often returned).

The real question is: does itinerancy, understood this way, work for you? Or maybe, does it work for us? Now?

Because Jesus’s program – with its emphasis on itinerancy – didn’t disappear two thousand years ago. It remains a way of being alive in the world with oneself and others. Even as it evolves, the fundament – you cannot possess anything, including a self – remains intact.

So our work in this regard is to understand Jesus’s message and program then so that we can apply it now, with the full force of the life-affirming love that characterizes God and Creation.

Are you a wanderer? A homesteader? Are you a little of both? It’s okay to start with identity – to locate ourselves in a familiar narrative framework. But those frameworks are not ends in and of themselves; they are scaffolds that facilitate deeper inquiry. Eventually they have to be released.

Ask yourself: to what aspects of selfhood do you cling? What will you not let go of ever? How is the world affected either way?

For me, in my practice, those inquiries and inquires like them all sugar out in, I am scared and don’t know what to do with the fear.

It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m scared of – fear finds a way to keep going. Fix the monster under the bed and one shows up in the closet. Fix the one in the closet and suddenly something’s tapping at the window.

That is my problem, right? That is where so much of my confusion, error, sin and all the rest of my separation-based pathology takes root and flowers. Demon seeds abound! I am scared and don’t know what to do with my fear.

And Jesus comes along and says, hey Sean? Give everything away, forget every value you hold, hit the road and help others as much as possible. And my response is, no. I will not. That’s crazy. Nobody can do that. I’ll die without a savings account, a stocked pantry, a good therapist, a cozy pair of PJs, a yoga mat.

But here is the thing. When we take a few steps on the road after Jesus – when we lean ever so faintly into the itinerancy that is so essential to his way – we discover that we can let go of fear as well.

What we are in truth is upstream of fear and when we are ready to accept this, we will know a peace that surpasses in every way the limitations of our understanding.

Fear, like hunger or fatigue, desire or anger – like our addiction to comfort – can be set aside. It’s just another thing we hold onto in order to validate our personal existence, like a reputation or a bank account or a mood. I’m not saying it’s easy to release; I’m saying that it can be released. And that releasing it is in practice no different from releasing anything else.

And doing so calms us, which allows us to give attention differently, which allows us to show up for life in ways that really do affirm and sustain and give grace to it.

I want the love of God more than I want fear. My life changed when I was finally able to say that with integrity. It changed me. However slowly, grudgingly and imperfectly I do it, I place nothing between myself and the love of God – including cherishing that self more than I cherish the Love of God – and the effect is happiness and peace. The effect is clarity and simplicity.

Becoming itinerant is a process. It takes time to learn what it is and what it is not. It takes time and energy to practice it. There are ups and downs, often significant ones. It also takes the company of folks who share the commitment. We cannot do this alone.

Following Jesus is in many ways about emptying ourselves of everything but a sincere desire to know and obey – to become subordinate to – the will of God, which is Love. As this clarifies, our living simplifies, and we remember the joy that is our inheritance as innocent children of a loving God.