This Sunday, Jesus’s Words Are Shocking, Until You Realize Who He Is Describing

Sunday’s Gospel reading sounds alarmingly extremist — until you think of one person who they apply to on the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C.

That person is Mother Teresa, St. Teresa of Kolkata, who the Church celebrates each Sept. 5. Here are five takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: ‘Hate’ Your mother and sister the way Mother Teresa did.

The Gospel starts with Jesus’s startling statement: “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.”

That sounds harsh — but in the life of a saint like Mother Teresa, you can see what it means.

First of all, the use of “hate” here doesn’t mean “detest” — it’s a Hebrew idiom that means “prioritize lower.” Americans do the same thing today when we say “I love pizza and hate salad” when we really mean we prefer pizza.

But think of that usage and see how Mother Teresa loved Jesus so much that she “hated” her family. After she became a religious sister, Mother Teresa never saw her mother and sister again (her father had died when she was young). She wanted to see them, but they were not allowed to leave Albania under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, and she wasn’t allowed to enter the country to visit them.

She could have renounced her vocation, rejected her faith and gotten to visited them, perhaps. An ungenerous family member might tell someone in her circumstance, “Don’t you love us? Why do you hate us?” But that would be unthinkable for Mother Teresa: Her love for them was great, but it paled in comparison to her love for God.

Second: Mother Teresa focused relentlessly on planning her tower and assessing her enemy, the way Jesus asks.

Jesus next tells his disciples not to be the guy who starts to build a tower — a defensive structure — but discovers that we can’t complete it. “Onlookers would laugh at him and say, ‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’”

He also says we don’t want to march out against our enemy and be overwhelmed by disproportionate numbers and destroyed.

Mother Teresa is the embodiment of both lessons. She knew what she needed to do: She was called by God to build a towering religious order that would take the love of Christ right to the frontlines of the suffering of the poorest of the poor.

So she did what was necessary to build her watchtower and face her enemy — spiritually and materially. She insisted on an hour of Eucharistic adoration daily from her congregation. When their work was especially busy, she said it was time for more prayer, not less. She also fundraised tirelessly — and shamelessly, unafraid to beg and cajole the wealthy into giving her their money to fund what God wanted.

Third: Mother Teresa followed Jesus, not the crowds.

Importantly, the Gospel begins by reporting that “Great crowds were traveling with Jesus.” Thus, the Gospel from the start contrasts two different ways of life: One is to follow the crowds, and the other is to follow Jesus.

Crowds are powerful. Human beings are hard-wired to agree with their peers, and to disagree with them takes a special act of faith. To leave the crowd and follow Jesus, you have to have the intellectual humility to question your own opinion and the courage to stand against an overpowering cultural headwind.

But that is the truth of our position. “Scarce do we guess the things on earth,” says the First Reading, from the Book of Wisdom “and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven, who can search them out?”

Mother Teresa showed that it is neither the crowd nor the intellectual giants in life who know the most: It is those who are humble enough to actually listen to what God says and do it. She was profound not because she was so smart, but because she was so single-minded and pure-hearted.

“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done,” she said. “We will be judged by ‘I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.’”

Jesus said we were to treat everyone as if they were him, and therefore to give everyone the love and attention we would give a family member. Mother Teresa did just that.

Fourth: So did St. Paul.

We have in our readings another example of a Christian who prioritized Christ higher than his home life and the opinion of his peers. St. Paul in the Second Reading is in prison when he sends his companion, the slave Onesimus, to be given his freedom. Paul presents Onesimus as one “whose father I have become in my imprisonment.” Paul is embracing Christ’s supernatural definition of family, and rejecting the culture’s slavery in favor of freedom in Christ, insisting that the former “master” of Onesimus should now be his “brother.”

This is the new reality in the Kingdom of God:  Kingdom virtues are family virtues and in the Kingdom, everybody is our family.

St. Teresa of Kolkata knew this, and she is so strongly identified with her spiritual parenthood — and with Christ’s “Kingdom” family —that it is hard to call her anything but “Mother Teresa.” She did things for others that we would only do for our family.

We would pour our time and attention into caring for our family member, no matter what it took. She would pour her time and attention into caring for a random dying homeless man, no matter what it took. We would give our dearest possession to help a family member in trouble, but Mother Teresa wanted her Congressional Gold Medal melted down and the gold sold for the poor. St. Paul saw a slave as his equal in human dignity, saying “welcome him as you welcome me;” and Mother Teresa saw the poorest of the poor and welcomed them like the family members she could no longer visit.

Fifth: But we aren’t Mother Teresa or St. Paul. How does all of this apply to us?

Here are a few practical takeaways.

First, it’s important to note that Jesus isn’t asking us to be indifferent to our family. He is asking us to prioritize them lower than him, as he asked before. Simply put: When we are presented the choice between pleasing him or pleasing our family, he wants us to please him; and when we have a choice between offending him or offending our family, he wants us to offend them.

Why is that okay? Because it is the only way to keep our family safe. That is what Jesus is talking about when he says to build a tower and assess the enemy.

Jesus will later use the watchtower as a metaphor for the vigilance we are supposed to have and compare the Church to an army battling the powers of hell. He wants us to know that the most vicious enemy imaginable — an enemy that wants us to be unhappy forever — is already upon us, and even now is amassing nearby, sending sniper fire into our homes, and amassing troops to finish us off.

We see his work all around us. Consumerism enslaves us as we spend more money than we have and work more hours than is healthy to buy more stuff than we need. It keeps us from giving our money, our time, and our homes to what God wants.

“In the same way, anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple,” Jesus says at the end of the Gospel.

Jesus shows us the greatest example of what he means when comes before us at each Mass, having given everything that is his such a great degree that he no longer looks like himself at all, but looks like a simple white host. When we say “Amen” to the body of Christ, we are choosing his way of abandonment; choosing him above all of our own possessions.

Then we can look out at the powerful enemy who has captured the attention of the world and know that, by joining the battle with the saints, our smaller numbers will absolutely win the day.

Image: Alamy

By Tom Hoopes