In the Gospel passage for today, Jesus makes it clear that he is to be the center of our lives. Of course, we are to love our families. We are to love our parents, our children, and other family members. The Church holds, and has always held, that the family is the foundational building block of society. But love of our family should not get in the way of loving Christ. In the culture of Jesus, a person's identity, including their religion, was defined primarily by the family to which they belonged. Converting to a new religion, without the family's approval, was well-nigh unthinkable. The first followers of Christ often had to make hard choices in the conflict between their faith and their family.
The words of Jesus apply not only to family, but to everything. God made us with a deep, existential hunger that only his love can satisfy. We find peace and fulfillment only when we accept God's love and give ourselves in love to him in return. Christ is God Incarnate, God's love manifest among us. It is only through union with Christ that we experience the true completion of our hearts, the true fulfillment of our existential yearning. That is a principal reason that Christ must be the center of our lives.
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Image Credit: Christ the King Statue 2, from Wikimedia Commons.
