Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time-A
Trying to live a life of discipleship has never been easy. As in life itself, there are good and happy times when it is easy to be prayerful and filled with the Spirit. At other times, a disciple is called to do the hard things, many times in conflict with our temporal and natural desires.
The Gospel today highlights this dichotomy. In many corners of Christianity, preaching focuses more on a loving God who forgives our sins than on explaining that there will be times when our faith calls us to act in ways that are hard and, frankly, unpleasant. This point cannot be made clearer when Jesus tells us, “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.”
Some, at this point, would recoil at the perceived negativity of the demand Jesus places on discipleship. A sane person hardly relishes the pain and suffering associated with the cross. That sentiment, purely human in nature, is only half of the story. The commonly known description of a mother in labor is, in a sense, her picking up the cross with a result far greater than the pain, the birth of her child. If we haven’t learned the lesson yet, we should soon. Everything good and life-giving does not happen without some suffering and death.
St. Paul, in our second reading, expands the thought to the reality of supernatural life. He says that when we are baptized and made adopted sons and daughters of God, we accept Christ’s cross, and we accept his death. When plunged into the waters of baptism, the ritual is meant to symbolize our dying and death to the natural, only to be reborn in the supernatural. And as Christ was buried and raised on the third day, we, too, as his body, have been called to our life in him.
Plenty of folks have come to accept the premise that pain and suffering are often a condition of new life. After all, it is our faith, and although we would hope the harshness remains manageable, we all know part of it will be our future.
What is harder to come to grips with is Jesus’ teaching about our loved ones, which seems to be contrary to the Christian and human experience. “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.” His words seem harsh and unloving and appear to be an ultimatum. Mature adults have long learned that love is not a singular thing directed to a single person. We can concurrently love those close to us and love God at the same time. So why is Jesus demanding such a disposition to be worthy?
As mentioned earlier, a person can love many things at the same time without diminishing any of the relationships. This is not Jesus’ point here. What he is telling us, as loving creatures, is to place our love for another in proper order. The reality of a fallen world is that although human beings have been called to love, there is also a tendency to misuse the gift.
He warns that loving a human being more than loving God is a disproportionate use of the gift. No human being, no matter how good, can be our ultimate destiny. They can’t offer salvation, nor do they have the power to raise us from the dead. Placing all of our energies in another human being as if they are a god can never be a Christian’s ultimate desire.
The interpretation should come as no surprise, as Jesus answered the question of what the greatest commandment is. He says, we should “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind”. Then the second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Picking up your cross and loving God first and then your neighbor are the teachings that help us live proportional lives. Why? Jesus tells us. “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” This is why we willingly do things that seem contrary to our nature. It is the only way we become worthy of Christ.