Early one morning a few weeks ago, I was sitting on the beach in Port Stanley. Playing at the edge of the water was a young mother and her 1 year old baby boy – on his first ever visit to a beach. The joy of the Mom and child was evident in the broad smiles on the Mom’s face and the giggles of the little lad. Shortly after, they were joined by his grandmother, and the love between the Nana and the daughter and the grandson was so visible as to become the focus of all the activity taking place. The sight of sand and the sound of surf was secondary to the love and joy of child and parent and grandparent. It was inspiring to be there to watch. And, as became apparent later to me, being there that day was God’s whisper in my soul.
So, what has this got to do with our readings today? Simply this. Our Gospel today begins with the words “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.” That sounds like a particularly harsh thing to say.
I know what it means to be a son and have a mother and father. And I know what it means to be a parent (and grandparent). And so, I struggled with these words. I loved my parents and I love my children – How could God demand that I must love God more?
So, for many years, I dismissed the saying in my mind, and assumed I would figure out what it all means sometime later. Often, when we come across something in scripture that just doesn’t make sense, we dismiss it. It is an obstruction, a brick in our path that we just don’t want to deal with. But what happens is that each time we come across a teaching or a parable or an insight that we just don’t get, and dismiss it, we slowly build a wall of those bricks of dismissal, until we get to a point that we start to think that Scripture isn’t really relevant to our life experience today. The combination of all of these dismissals become a wall of indifference to the relevance of God’s message.
So , how am I to understand those opening words of today’s Gospel?
Part of understanding some of the words of Jesus we read in scripture is knowing that in that culture at that time, a common way of speaking was to use extremes to make a point. Structures used to make a point are called idioms. No, there isn’t an exam at the end of this homily. School is out. So we see often hate-love, light-dark, sacred-profane as the structure within which a teaching is given. Yes – it sounds different to our 21st century ears, since we don’t often use that idiom. But imagine if someone in the future saw something I wrote that said my partner drives me up the wall. And that my wife got so mad at me that she hit the roof. Would they think that cars in 2023 could travel vertically? Or that wives who get mad can levitate? So one of the things I learned was that I can’t look at first century writings with twenty-first century eyes. That helps when you come across phrases like the one that begins today’s gospel. Understanding the style of writing helps a lot.
But there is a deeper and even more profound insight contained in those words……
We assume that because we love God MORE means we love our family LESS. It betrays a perception that love is a finite resource, a thing in limited supply to be carefully doled out to others. But – we know in our hearts that isn’t true. Think of our love for our family. For our children. To love one does not diminish our love for the other. Our depth of love is the same. And as we add more and more to the ones we love deeply, it doesn’t diminish our love for all the others. So what about loving God? What is different? Perhaps it comes down to one thing.
God has loved us into an eternal existence. God’s love for us is shown – not only in our individual creation, but in God’s creation of a universe for us to exist in, a planet to live on, an ecosystem to be a part of, and this love extends beyond just this realm of creation – it infuses eternity. It is in this breadth of God’s love we can begin to see how it differs from our love, and how we can be inspired and energized to share that love, that insight, with others.
Jesus goes on in this chapter to provide more insights for his disciples … and indeed, those insights continue to nourish our relationship with God. For in as much as we realize ourselves to be immersed in God’s love, we become even more able to profoundly and deeply love those in our families – and indeed, to share that love with the stranger, the orphan, the outcast. And it is through that outpouring of love and care and concern, you and I not only live out our calling as disciples of Christ – but we become more aware of the presence of God’s love surrounding all that we see – including a young little boy with his Mom and Nana, on a beach in June.