"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
This would be megalomaniacal for any normal person to say, whether or not they were a leader of any kind, however great they may genuinely have been. Who could claim that they should have more importance to us than our own parents or children? But we remember that the one who said this was not an egomaniac. He was Jesus, who was meek and humble of heart, who came to serve and give his life as a ransom for many. He did not demand our love in order to assuage some insecurity in himself. Rather, it was precisely because we were made to love God as our highest good, and because Jesus himself was God in the flesh, that he said what he said. He knew we would be unable to find joy and the fulfillment for which we were intended if we loved anything more than him. He knew that if we loved father or mother or son or daughter more than him we could not be loving them rightly or well. Love for anyone, if it refused to be taken up in God and ordered to him, would be revealed to be false love. Because, after all, God himself is love (se First John 4:8). This is confirmed by the fact that we are only being asked to reciprocate the love God himself has first demonstrated for us.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you (see Isaiah 49:15).
We are called by Jesus to take up our crosses and follow after him. Any why? Because only if we will lose our life for his sake can we find true and lasting life. Only if we die to all of the false promises of worldly happiness can we awaken to the true happiness that can be found in God alone. We are called to die, but not for the sake of dying. It is rather in order to be totally free, available, and present for the true life that Jesus longs to give us. To die is an unavoidable part of the journey because of our human condition. But in Christ it need not be the ultimate defeat it otherwise might have been.
Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death?
We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,
so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father,
we too might live in newness of life.
Of ourselves we would have been unable to enter into the death of Christ or to die for his sake. We would have been every bit as unable to follow him as Peter was revealed to be during Christ's Passion. It is only the infusion of the Holy Spirit that can reproduce the life, death, and resurrection in us. And this means that dying isn't primary about an effort on our part as much as it is a learning to surrender to the working of grace in our lives. It means that dying to self cannot, in the end, be a merely self-directed project. It isn't the inevitable result of the right mortifications, much less the culmination of negative attitudes of self-hatred. It is only the letting go of that which is good for that which is better that can bring this new life to birth in us. And the onus for achieving this in each of us is always first on God himself.
Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
We are called to receive Jesus because in doing so we receive the whole Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we accept the words of Jesus and therefore his absolute claim on our lives what we are doing is accepting the truth of reality as it is, rather than living in a world of pretend where other goods stand in competition or opposition with God himself. We have seen that to accept Jesus in this way requires a graced death to self. But in the what he went on to say we can see that this actually happens in small ways, in little things done with great love.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet
will receive a prophet's reward,
and whoever receives a righteous man
because he is a righteous man
will receive a righteous man's reward.
We don't have to ourselves be the great prophet to receive the prophet's reward, which just need to cast our lot with him, in whatever way our life allows. There is a sense in which we receive the reward of righteousness not so much be being righteous ourselves as by receiving the one who is himself righteous. Somehow in receiving him it is as though his own righteousness becomes present within us, shared among those who receive him. But if even that sounds too difficult for us Jesus went further:
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because the little one is a disciple—
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.
If we don't feel capable of running headlong to the cross let us begin with the cup of cold water for his little ones, done for his sake. Acts of love such as this that seem insignificant to us are in fact potent vehicles of grace. Though it does not happen right away or all at once, the transformation Jesus desires for us will be inexorably accomplished if we are faithful in small things like these. If we learn to be thus faithful in little things we will find ourselves, even to our surprise, faithful in larger ones. In the first reading today we see how little acts of kindness can snowball and become life changing for all who are involved:
Elisha promised, "This time next year
you will be fondling a baby son."
Let us therefore prefer nothing to the love of Christ, for this love is drawing us to more than any earthly love can offer, and does better by our dearest ones than we ourselves can do for them alone.
Blessed the people who know the joyful shout;
in the light of your countenance, O LORD, they walk.
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