This Sunday, Love Christ More Than Family and He Will Love Them More Than You Can

Jesus gives a lesson about the paradoxes of love im the Gospel for this Sunday’s Mass: Loving him means taking up your cross to set yourself free, losing your life to find it, and loving your family less in order to love them more.

Here are five takeaways for Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Sunday’s Gospel, from Matthew, seem to contradict itself at first glance.

In the beginning of the Gospel, Jesus says to love God more than your family.

“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,” he says.

The message: We are made for more than human love, and our family members are made for more than our love. We are all made to be loved perfectly and forever — embraced by flawless goodness. We were made for the infinite God, and nothing else is enough.

But then, Jesus says in Sunday’s Gospel to receive Christians as you receive Christ himself.

“Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me,” he says.

That seems like a contradiction. We get that we should not make idols of our family members — we should never put them in the place that God alone holds. But then Jesus says to literally put other Christians in the place of Christ. How are we to receive a finite, flawed, imperfect human being the same way we receive the all-powerful God of heaven and earth?

St. Augustine, as he often does, gives the solution succinctly. When our family says “Love us,” Augustine says to answer, “I will love you in Christ, not instead of Christ. You will be with me in him, but I will not be with you without him.”

He’s right. Loving your family in Christ is the only way to truly love your family, because Jesus Christ is the only answer to the aching longing we and our family members feel for love.

Second: St. Paul explains what it means to be in Christ.

“Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Paul asks the Romans, then explains why this matters. He says that our baptism doesn’t just give us life after death — we are baptized so that we “might live in newness of life” right now.

In other words, we die to the merely natural family of Adam and Eve we were born in, and rise into the new life in Christ that we were created for. In Christ, all the old clichés about life fade away —  “You’re only human,” “Don’t expect too much,” and “Life is hard then you die” don’t sum us up anymore. Instead, all the good things come true: we “get more out of life;” we “live life to the full” and “Make life an adventure” — we “Expand our horizons” all the way to heaven.

So, we gain quite a bit by being baptized into Christ’s life. But we also gain from being baptized into his death, because “You, too must think of yourself as dead to sin,” he says. This means that the grace of baptism is capable of delivering on a whole other set of personal goals. It gives me a way to be “Free from addiction” so that I can finally “Live my best life,” “Live for others” and at long last “Become who I was meant to be.”

This is what Jesus means in the Gospel when he says, “whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me,” and “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” St. Paul sums it all up in a phrase: “If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.”

He is saying that if we suffer the indignities Jesus suffered for us as man we will gain the dignity of what he achieved for us as God.

Third: How does this work, practically?

So, you want to live in Christ and love your family in Christ. What does that kind of life look like? We know how it doesn’t look.

• We shouldn’t love family more than God In the morning. We should put our morning prayer with God first, before we chat with a family member, interact with friends and family on social media, or answer texts or emails.
• We shouldn’t love others more than God in the daytime. Losing your life for Christ requires prioritizing what he demands over what our workplace asks. Conscience trumps profit, prayer and work go together, and pleasing God is more important than pleasing our boss.
• We shouldn’t love family more than God at night. If that’s when your family prays a daily rosary, do it even if someone doesn’t really want to. If that’s when you tend to waste time on things you shouldn’t, refuse — even if someone really does want to.

• If you are a busy parent or caretaker, and your time is not your own, offer your efforts to Christ, remember that “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.”

Jesus wants us to recognize that whenever we love someone more than God, we fail in the first and greatest commandment to “Love God above all things”  — but also the Second Commandment, to “Love our neighbor as ourself,” because to love someone is to will the greatest good for them; and that means willing God for them.

Fourth:  The Readings give us a story to show how loving God first means loving your family more.

In the Gospel, Jesus says “Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward” and in the First Reading, we get an example of just that — and the prophet’s reward is “family.”

In the story from Second Kings Chapter 4, Elisha the prophet comes to town and “a woman of influence” invites him to dinner. After that, she begins to treat Elisha like family, first providing a meal whenever he passes through town, then going so far as to say to her husband, “I know that Elisha is a holy man of God. Since he visits us often, let us arrange a little room on the roof and furnish it for him.”

He wants to repay her by putting a good word in for her to the king, but she refuses, so he asks a servant what he can do and learns, “She has no son, and her husband is old.” In other words, her husband is nearing death, with no one to inherit his property and care for her. So he gives her the gift of a son.

The full chapter gives more examples of the same gift: Elisha will eventually raise her new son from the dead and help a widow buy back her sons from debtors. The stories of Elisha and his mentor Elijah raising people from the dead are precursors to the stories of Jesus raising people from the dead. In every case, Jesus raises from the dead for the sake of a family:

• Jesus raises the son of the widow of Nain from the dead for his mother.
• Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus from the dead for her father.
• Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead for his sisters.

The stories demonstrate what Jesus Christ does for us and our family. If we put him and his disciples first, he will do things for our family we could never do ourselves.

Fifth: The sacraments are the ultimate expression of this exchange of love.

St. Paul says that in baptism we die to our old way of life and rise to a new one.

The Eucharist is the key sign of this new life — and joining the communion line is the first step toward a life where we put him first, take up our cross and follow, and lose the life we focused on ourselves and find real life in Christ for ourselves and our loved ones.

Image: Family in the mists of Rio de Janeiro, wiki.

By Tom Hoopes