Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
This is a difficult teaching of Jesus that we tend to only acknowledge in passing, as perhaps applicable to some few worst case scenarios. We prefer to imagine that most of the time the Gospel will bring people together, even if not everyone is a Christian. After all, Christians filled with the fruits of the Holy Spirit really should be better at getting alone with others even when they disagree. But Jesus seemed to think that the priorities of the Kingdom were so different from those of the world that clashes would be inevitable. Christians would not be able to embrace the priorities about Jesus without going against those of the world in such a way that even their friends and family might no longer accept them. In such a case one might have to choose between family and Jesus himself. It might seem like choosing Jesus over family would evince a coldness or a lack of love on the part of the Christian. But the followers of Jesus were meant to understand that they could not love their parents or children truly if they did not love Jesus still more.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Not only ought we not love relatives more than Jesus if we wish to love them well we also must not love ourselves more than him. If we choose to put anything before the love of Christ that thing will become for us a destructive and demeaning idol. Only by loving Jesus more than ourselves can we love ourselves properly and according to the purpose for which we were made. Unfortunately the ego regards loving anything more than itself as a form of death. And in this sense the ego must die. We must lose this old life if we wish to find the new life offered by Jesus himself. The old life is a selfish one where we are the center and everything else orbits around us. The new life is one where the center is Jesus reigning on the throne. Naturally this is an either or proposition. Either we have Jesus or ourselves at the center. There is no workable compromise where they share the spot.
Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Given the importance of keeping Jesus at the center of our lives we should also realize how importance it makes receiving those he sent. We can't imagine that Jesus is truly central if we reject the teaching of his Apostles or their successors in the Church. A firmly defined relation to divine revelation prevents the centrality of Jesus from becoming a merely subjective idea. The ego would probably put up with the centrality of Jesus as long as it was in some way still the one defining what that entailed. This is why it important that we ourselves not be the last word on the interpretation of revelation. It can in fact become reassuring, if not immediately, at least over the long haul, when we encounter truths about our faith that are not in accord with our preferences or predilections. It's helps to prove we didn't make the whole thing up ourselves.
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because he is a disciple–
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.
We may not be prophets, but we can still share in the reward reserved for prophets. We may not be as righteous as we would like, but we can still receive a righteous man's reward. Our walk of discipleship may still be, even after years, quite immature. But by uniting ourselves to those disciples doing the will of Jesus by our own small acts of love we can hope to share in their reward. We may not be able to actually go out and involve ourselves in each and every ministry the Church has available. But by the small ways that we receive and welcome those who are involved by little actions done with great love it is as though we ourselves do in some sense go out together with them.
When I had looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognised myself in none of the members which St. Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish myself more favourably within the whole body. Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation. Indeed I knew that the Church had a body composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble member was not lacking; I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love. I knew that one love drove the members of the Church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more. I saw and realised that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place. In one word, that love is everlasting.Then, nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling: my call is love. Certainly I have found my place in the Church, and you gave me that very place, my God. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire finds its direction.- Saint Therese of Lisieux
To the external observer the growth of the Church may look a lot more like death and failure before it reveals itself to be new life. The appearance of failure is not necessarily an indication of failure. The apparent flimsiness of our own efforts does not necessarily mean they count for nothing. What matters most is to heed the words of Jesus, to love him well, and so become worthy of him. Then we can trust him to provide, not necessarily the rewards our egos want, but those that will truly satisfy us. He himself will align our actions, not with what we would pridefully plan ourselves, but with his purpose for us within his Body. And it is there only that we may hope to experience the fullness of life he intends for us.
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