Dear brothers and sisters,
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.”
(Luke 14:26)
As we draw closer with our Lord to Jerusalem, His teachings become more radical. Today, He reveals to us how He alone can save us from unending death and raise us to life eternal. No one else can.
Today, our Lord wakes us up to the reality of our disordered affection for other human beings, especially those in our family, more especially for ourselves. In our fallen state, we have come to overvalue their worths and our own.
Since Adam and Eve, we continue to think that we really do not need God in our lives and as long as we have each other’s backs like families should, we will be fine. Throughout human history we have built our whole existence on this lie. This is the disorder on which our fallen nature is built and the is the lie that our Lord is saying that we must hate.
Today, He is saying to us that He is Love and no one else and no thing else is.Today, He is saying that He is the Creator, and no one else and no thing else is.Today, He is saying that He is our End, and no one else and no thing else is.
We cannot replace Him as the Beginning and End of our existence. But we do. We cannot help but replace Him with father, mother wife, and children, brothers and sisters and most often we replace Him with ourselves.
In doing so, we end up hurting one another and ourselves because we are assigning to ourselves the Infinite Goodness that we are most certainly not. Knowing this does not begin to free us from our slavery to this lie. We still replace God. This is our unending death.
This is the Cross that we must carry and follow Him to Jerusalem with. It is on the Cross that He sets us free from this unending death and recreates us into His own likeness of Loving only God as God and our neighbor as our neighbor. – Fr. Simi.