13th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me.  Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.  Sounds challenging, heartless, even inhuman.  Is it?  In the original language the word prefer reads: “love more than”.  Let’s work with that: Anyone who loves father (or mother, or son or daughter) more than me is not worthy of me.  So much depends on what we understand by love, (and perhaps we never finish exploring that); but genuine love can never put us at odds with Jesus.

Personally, I have never had to test out the limits of loving son or daughter; and my relationship to Jesus and the Gospel never put my relationship to mum or dad under any strain.  But I have had to face the reality of saying and doing things that I know deeply offend people (perhaps some of you), and trying always to love and respect them deeply at the same time when they  have criticised me for what I have said or done.  I have struggled, and not succeeded often enough, to absorb the criticism, take it on board calmly, and respond with respect in love.  

I am sure similar experiences are not uncommon, and, with some of you, may even have occurred within your own families.  Loving is a mystery; it seems a constant challenge – and yet, when we manage it, we know we have grown, and become freer.  Loving children, for example, in the present cultural climate, might be harder than it was a generation or two ago: the advertising industry has become sophisticated over the years; peer pressure was always real, but perhaps even stronger today.  So many parents don’t know how to say “no” to their children, or say it inconsistently or dysfunctionally, depending on their own moods or levels of nervous energy.  Perhaps some believe that to say “no” is to withhold love.  But that betrays not strength, or freedom, or maturity, or genuine love, but mutually destructive insecurity.  And who is there to help them?

Loving takes lots of shapes, and one of those essential shapes is "tough love", and it may never be understood, never forgiven.  That is sad, but the alternative can be as destructive of those we love as of ourselves, and a waving good-bye to self-discovery, to maturity, and to growth in freedom.

Jesus went on: Those who do not take up their cross and follow me are not worthy of me.  There are many cultural attitudes in our current Australian society that conflict clearly with Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom.  To challenge them, respectfully, and calmly to claim a different perspective, at the footy club, in the pub, at the family reunion, around the automatic coffee machine, at the play group, even, perhaps, in the prayer group, takes courage, and perhaps a reasonably strong sense of identity.  That may be why those attitudes are not often challenged, and why our society has remained hard-hearted, xenophobic and self-centred.

Most Australians identify themselves as Christian, that is, as ones who follow Christ.  Have we made enough effort really to find out for ourselves what Jesus is really on about? why he finished up carrying a cross to his death? and why he asked us to step into line behind him with ours?

I don’t believe that Jesus found it easy to say: Those who find their life will lose it; those who lose their life for my sake will find it.  But he had to say it simply because it was true and because he loved us.  He knew that the only way this world would become more human, just and peaceful, welcoming and inclusive, was by choosing to be different from the way it was: not from any attachment to conflict or a good fight, but from a mature and wise love – strong and confident enough to be stretched and tested, and sometimes to be hurt in the process.

Yet Jesus knows our fears and insecurities, our struggles to love, to live authentically.  He doesn’t criticise us.  Nor does he soften his call – he won’t step back from tough love, precisely because it is love.  But he is willing to stand with us and to forgive us when we back down, even if seventy times seven....  He still hopes, and he takes pleasure even in our little victories – because they are good for us and for our world.