Bishop Barron's Gospel Reflection November 6, 2016

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Luke 14:25-33

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 Reading 1 Rom 13:8-10 Brothers and sisters: Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, You shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet, and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying, namely, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law. Gospel Lk 14:25-33 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."