Sunday 23 (C) September 5 2010
Wisdom 9:13-18; Philemon 9-10; 12-17 & Luke 14: 25-33
There are times when the message of Jesus in the Gospel makes me feel angry and confused – and today’s Gospel is one of those occasions. We have just listened to Jesus proclaim: If any man comes to me without hating his father and mother and family... and his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Can these really be the words of the Son of God, the God who is love? Can these be the words of the man who – I believe – loved me so much he died for me? How can he show me so much love, and then ask me to hate? Can he seriously be demanding that I hate my dead father, who taught me so much during his all-too-short life, my widowed mother with her increasing arthritis, my brothers and their beautiful families, the boys in my house – especially those who seem to need so much of my time, worry and imagination to help them find the right future for them and their families? How can my God ask me to hate and to love at the same time?
I am sure that clever scripture scholars can offer all sorts of ways through this conundrum – speaking of the Jewish context, the social pressures on the earliest disciples just to conform to “normal behaviour” and not the radical message of the Gospel in the 1st century, the inevitable conflict with the Synagogue and orthodoxy which the earliest Christians faced – and I am sure they are right in what they say. The problem is that these words of Jesus are addressed to you and to me, today, in the 21st century since the Incarnation and Resurrection. How can they possibly be “Good News” to us? How can they be an attractive message to those seeking faith in our modern world?
However obscurely, I do think these words of Christ say something important – though difficult – to us. In all three of the readings we have heard, we are reminded of the deep paradoxes which stand at the heart of our faith. That first reading from Wisdom reminds us that we have been gifted with intelligence and reason, but that those gifts are limited, finite. No matter how deep and profound our human knowledge, unless it is guided towards true wisdom by the Holy Spirit, guided towards the straight paths which lead to growth for ourselves and those around us, it will remain only human knowledge – just as capable of evil as it is of good, as we might remember 65 years after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is a message that perhaps we need to hear more than ever today, when we are reliably informed by the greatest of our thinkers that philosophy is dead, there is no further need for reason, and that the answer to everything is gravity (an amusing thought, since according to my Yr.10 Biology students the answer to everything is either Sex, Smoking or Evolution – and gravity seems a lot less exciting in comparison). Human knowledge is not wisdom; it is a beginning and not an end.
Then we have Paul’s letter to Philemon. Paul writes as a prisoner, literally in chains for his preaching of the Gospel, and as a bondsman of Christ Jesus. And yet he writes of freedom and liberation. He, himself a prisoner, has freed Onesimus from sins by baptising him, and now sends him back to his master Philemon, no longer as a slave but as a brother in the Lord. In doing so, Paul makes a great sacrifice, surrendering possibly his only companion in his prison, yet does so gladly and with a free spirit. Perhaps again this is a message we should all hear. For many, freedom is simply the ability to do what I want, when I want, and for as long as I want. But Paul reminds us that human freedom, like human knowledge, is most truly free when it is ordered away from ourselves and towards another. We choose most freely, and in the most perfectly human way, when we choose to do what we know to be right and what can benefit someone else. All other choices imprison us in fear and in selfishness, enslaving us and chaining us to ourselves alone. Like our knowledge, our freedom is a beginning and not an end.
So what of Jesus’ words in the Gospel? I think Our Lord is asking us to see the limitations of our human love when set against the love of God. I think he is reminding us that – like our human knowledge and our human freedom – our human love is only a beginning and not an end in itself. Our hearts are frail and fragile, and unless our love is founded on something less limited than ourselves, even our love will fail to bear the fruit it should. Unless our “little loves” – no matter how close the ties of blood or the depth of the relationship – are founded on the greater love which God has shown to us, and the relationship with him to which he calls us, those loves will never achieve their final goal and their true fruition. In short, God does not call us to hate, but to put his love at the very centre of our lives, and let all our other relationships spring from that. In essence, it is a rephrasing of Christ’s great commandment: You must love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself (Lk. 10:27) or, as St Benedict puts it in the Rule: put nothing whatever before the love of Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life. (RSB 72).
Christ’s message to us today sets us a real challenge – putting God at the very centre of all we do, his wisdom before our knowledge, his will before ours and his love as the very foundation of our love – but it does not ask us to do the impossible. What he asks of us, he has already done for us – that is the whole meaning of the Cross, and of this Eucharist we know celebrate together. So, as we receive his Body which was broken for us and his Blood which was poured out for us, let us ask him for the grace to truly be his disciples – not counting the cost to ourselves, since he himself did not count the cost of our salvation.
Fr Oswald McBride OSB