Today’s Gospel is probably one of those passages from the Gospel that would we prefer to skip over or completely edit out of the Gospel. Many people say that Jesus is being excessively hard here. Love and care for family is a basic human need and experience. For human beings, life without a family is impossible. How can we be expected to hate our family?
For me, this is Jesus’ “how to” manual or “do it yourself” manual for Christian life. True Christians have their lives centered on the Cross. There are far too many people who proclaim to be Christian but who do not really live a Christian life. They are half-Christian who end up being counter signs of Christian life is really supposed to be. They never sat down to calculate how to live out the Cross in their personal life circumstances.
The word hate usually means for us a movement towards action and violence. If we hate someone, we usually act out the hatred verbally or physically or even by plotting vengeance. Here Jesus is talking about reprioritizing and reordering what is important in our lives. If love of family is so important in human life, putting God before family and any other our own plans or values is much more important. That is page one on the “How to Be a Christian” manual. Page two is renouncing material goods and trusting above all in God. The third page is the Sermon on the Mount. Most of us want to skip straight to page 500, which is the part about the resurrection.
God calls us to think about the challenge put before us in the Word of God and to move into real action, that is a conversion. That involves planning, discerning, praying, and calculating how to live out our personal cross publicly in each stage of our lives. As Christians, living the Cross is our first love. Everything else is just an expression of living out the Cross.
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me
cannot be my disciple.
Image: Photo by Cdoncel on Unsplash.