Friends,
in our Gospel today the Lord offers one of the greatest, most “slap you
in the face” challenges he ever offered. “If anyone comes to me without
hating his father and mother…and even his own life, he cannot be my
disciple.”
There
is the great spiritual principle that undergirds the entire Gospel:
detachment. The heart of the spiritual life is to love God and then to
love everything else for the sake of God. But we sinners, as St.
Augustine said, fall into the trap of loving the creature and forgetting
the Creator. That’s when we get off the rails.
We
treat something less than God as God—and trouble ensues. And this is why
Jesus tells his fair-weather fans that they have a very stark choice to
make. Jesus must be loved first and last—and everything else in their
lives has to find its meaning in relation to him.
In
typical Semitic fashion, he makes this point through a stark
exaggeration: “Unless you hate your mother and father, wife and
children, sisters and brothers....” Well yes, hate them in the measure
that they have become gods to you. For precisely in that measure are
they
dangerous.
Wednesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 487
My beloved, obedient as you have always been,
not only when I am present but all the more now when I am absent,
work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
For God is the one who, for his good purpose,
works in you both to desire and to work.
Do everything without grumbling or questioning,
that you may be blameless and innocent,
children of God without blemish
in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation,
among whom you shine like lights in the world,
as you hold on to the word of life,
so that my boast for the day of Christ may be
that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.
But, even if I am poured out as a libation
upon the sacrificial service of your faith,
I rejoice and share my joy with all of you.
In the same way you also should rejoice and share your joy with me.
Great crowds were traveling with Jesus,
and he turned and addressed them,
"If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me
cannot be my disciple.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion?
Otherwise, after laying the foundation
and finding himself unable to finish the work
the onlookers should laugh at him and say,
'This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.'
Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?
But if not, while he is still far away,
he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms.
In the same way,
everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple."
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