Today’s readings: 2 Kings 4, 8-11.14-16; Romans 6, 3-4.8-11; Matthew 10, 37-42.
A major issue that arises today when we analyse how we live and the meaningfulness of much of what we do, is that we have lost sight of what it really means to be a human being. As Communion and Liberation movement leader Julian Carron recently said in an interview, the crisis we face today is much deeper than simply the rejection of this or that ethical precept.
There is deep wisdom in what the gospel says today about the meaning of life, about what gives meaning and what robs the meaning of whatever we do. Going through today’s gospel text, it emerges very clearly what was meant when, from the very beginning of his existence, Jesus was hailed as a sign of contradiction.
Today we read: “Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me”. That should sound a very powerful statement to our ears. Loyalty to Jesus comes first, prior to the most intimate of relationships even in the context of family ties. This is not just a question of priorities, who comes first and second. It only shows the radical nature of faith. Jesus knows that the alternative to being radical is mediocrity. More than just priorities, it is a question of radicality. The gospel puts before us radical choices without which life risks becoming mediocre.
We cannot afford to fall into mediocrity. The philosophy of life that the gospel proposes and demands goes to the core of our daily living, to where we experience mostly our weakness and frailty. It is precisely there where talk about losing one’s life to find it makes most sense.
That is actually the response to the big issues of life which we find in the mystery of Jesus. But, as Jesus himself reminds us today, that mystery has been consumed, has come to fulfilment in the event of the cross. On the cross, where Jesus loses everything, Jesus becomes a gift, his self-giving is total. It is that event which sets the standard for a meaningfully Christian life.
When Jesus in today’s text insists on the requisites that make us “worthy of him”, he is setting very high standards for Christian living. This is what we actually need to repropose to people in this day and age. Setting standards does not mean disheartening people or just making Christian life sound too difficult.
With time, we’ve always lowered and lowered these standards to render Christian living as merely nominal. We were more interested in keeping the masses flowing to our churches. This led to dichotomies between practising religion and living up to the faith, between what we celebrate in our liturgies and the ethical dimension of how we live, between what we profess to be and who we are in practice.
These dichotomies today no longer hold ground. They make a parody of religion and put the gospel somewhere high up in the sky as an ideal that is simply unreachable. But now is the time when we need to recognise the real nature of the challenge we’re facing, not only from the point of view of the Church, but mainly from that of our own humanity.
Now is the time to repropose the gospel ideal in its entirety, even in its beauty, because its challenge consists mainly in bringing our life’s beauty to the fore. Finding life, rather than losing it according to the terms Jesus sets before us, is about the joy of living. It surely has a price.
But as Jesus promises, the outcome makes the efforts a blessing and gives us back life in all its worth. As a Christian community committed to bring the good news of the gospel even to today’s world, what is being demanded of us is more than just repeating doctrine and pointing fingers to a culture that many a time we label or judge as valueless. What transmitting the faith now calls for is a deep understanding of the human challenge we’re facing and the courage to make visible in society at large the attractive power of a fully Christian life.