GOSPEL: Matthew 10, 37-42
Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio
Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...
Jesus said to his apostles:
“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;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
“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;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
"Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet
will receive a prophet’s reward,
and whoever receives a righteous man
because he is a righteous man
will receive a righteous man’s reward.
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because the little one is a disciple—
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet
will receive a prophet’s reward,
and whoever receives a righteous man
because he is a righteous man
will receive a righteous man’s reward.
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because the little one is a disciple—
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”
The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ
Kieran’s summary . . . In this week’s passage, Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me . .” This translation makes it seem as if Jesus is making a moral point: that someone who loves their parents more than Christ is not at the moral level required for a disciple. But the Greek word for “worthy” actually means something different. What Jesus is saying is that if I love my parents more than Christ then I am not properly “adapted” to Christ. It is not my moral fibre that is the issue, but my priorities. If my priority is this natural life, then the life of grace will suffer. If my priority is relationships on a purely human level, then I will have difficulty loving as Christ calls me to love. The fact is that there are two types of life: the life of nature and the life of grace. If I am attached to my natural life, but still strive to follow Christ, then I may end up living a sort of moral rigorism. If my priority is the things of the flesh, but I try to keep the “rules” of Christianity, then those very rules will feel oppressive. My heart is attached to worldly things, so my conformity to Christian behaviour ends up being unwilling, not done with all my heart. What is the solution? The solution is to consider that this natural life is going to end someday anyhow! We cannot embrace the new life of the Spirit unless we turn away from the old life of the flesh. The choice is mine: will I continue making a priority of the natural life that I inherited from my parents? Or will I opt for the life of grace, which is offered to me by my heavenly Father? The cross is the instrument by which we leave our old lives behind and embrace the life of grace. God does not impose grace, he does not impose the cross, but we do well to accept them so that we can begin to live the life of the Spirit.
In the Gospel Jesus says that we will find our life if we lose it. In other words, there is a biological life and then there is life of the Spirit. If we are too preoccupied with our natural lives, then the life of the Spirit will be neglected
Jesus says in this Sunday’s Gospel: “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Surely something is wrong here? How can we find life by losing it? We only have one life, right? What Jesus means is that we have a life (of the biological sort) that we have received according to nature; and then we have another life that is according to grace, which we have received from Christ. In other words, there is a life that we get from our parents, and then there is another kind of life, the life Francis of Assisi chose when he returned his clothes to his father Pietro and said to him: “Up to today I have called you my father on earth; but from now on I will say with all confidence: “Our Father, who art in heaven”, because all my treasures lie in Him and in Him I have placed all my trust and hope” (Franciscan Sources 1043). Jesus says in the Gospel of John: "If one is not born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit".
If our natural life is our priority, but we still try to follow Jesus, then we will end up living a type of moralism: following rules that we would prefer not to have to keep because our real interest is in satisfying the desires of our natural life
There is nothing more Christian than this discourse, but we have an indomitable tendency to make compromises and to place our emphasis on fostering natural life, to the neglect of the life of the Spirit. We have certainty about the dynamics of natural life, whilst it demands faith to believe in the existence and importance of the life that comes from above. Furthermore, as well as requiring faith in God, the life of the Spirit calls on us to have freedom from our own plans and preoccupations. The result is that we end up keeping our clutches tight on biological life and, at the same time, we try to follow Jesus. But this cannot be done! This is how Christianity degenerates into moralism, a keeping of rules that we keep only with difficulty because our main drive is the preservation of our natural life. In trying to keep these rules, we ask our nature to do the things that we can only do by grace. And so we make Christianity into something oppressive, something that requires forcing the will to do what we do not want to do. We mimic the Love that comes from the Holy Spirit with do-goodism. We substitute Hope, which is a theological virtue, with the instinct for survival, an instinct that is the last to die. Faith, consequently, is reduced to the business of simply "understanding" something, grasping the content of a belief, and it is taught as if it were a body of conceptual content.
Embracing the new life of the Spirit requires turning away from the old life. The cross is the instrument by which we make this transition to life
To receive the new life of the Spirit you have to leave your old life behind, and the instrument that enables you to do that is the cross! When the cross touches our life, our natural reaction is to defend ourselves from the pain it brings, but that is the opportunity to "surrender" to the Father by abandoning ourselves to him. Then we enter into his life. But "whoever has kept his life for himself will lose it", because the natural life to which we are so attached is going to end eventually anyway. We are all going to die one day; we are all going to lose our natural lives. So it is important that, before this happens, we will already have found life of a different sort. Then, the day of our exit from this world is simply the end of a phase and we already possess the other kind of life. St. Paul said: "This life, which I live in the body, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me". The choice is mine: will I carry on as if the only life that matters is the life I received from my parents? Or will I opt for the life that is received from our Father in heaven? The events in our lives give us opportunities to choose. God does not impose grace, but simply offers it. It is better to accept this grace, embracing the cross, when it arrives.
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