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.
Human sin happens when we do not have God's love in the center, when we put something created in the center instead. When we do so, we bring about a disordered relationship with that created reality. For example, food is good and necessary. But if we make food the center of our lives, food becomes destructive. The same can be said for anything that is good in life, even our relationships with the people we love most. If we make other people our center, our love will be obsessive, unwholesome, and controlling. That is how a toxic or abusive relationship can start.
But when we put Christ in the center, the love we have for the created world will be well ordered and wholesome. We can then enjoy the things of the world to the right degree. We can also love others with an unselfish love, being channels of God's love in their lives. Thus, loving Christ before our family is far from loving our family less. Putting Christ before all others is the only way to love them fully, in a healthy way, helping them to experience Christ's love.
Sometimes our family might seek to derail us from the love of Christ, by bad example, by persuasion, or even through social ostracism. In such situation, we need to stay steadfast in keeping Christ in the center, even if we must suffer greatly. The same principle applies to belonging to any human organization, whether a club, a political party, or the like. Christ must come first. The same is true regarding our country. Patriotism is a virtue that we are called upon to cultivate. But if we had to choose between our country or Christ, Christ must always come first.
The First Reading for this Sunday highlights that when we build the kingdom of God, we also receive rewards in various ways. We see that the couple who shows hospitality to Elisha is rewarded by having a child, after being unable to conceive for years. We do not know what kind of blessing we will receive, but God will reward us, sometimes in ways we least expect, as with the couple in the reading.
The birth of the couple's son also foreshadows the miraculous birth of Christ. The passage follows a prophetic mode of anticipating the New Testament called typology. Throughout the Old Testament we see various events and persons who prefigure events and persons in the New Testament. In fact, the Old Testament can be understood fully only if we view it through the lens of the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, various women conceive miraculously after a long period of barrenness - Sarah, Leah, Samson's unnamed mother, Hannah, and the unnamed woman in today's First Reading. Additionally, in the New Testament, Elizabeth also conceives with miraculous help from God. All of these miraculous conceptions point toward the miraculous conception of Christ, which is the beginning of the salvation of humanity and restoration of all of creation. The coming of Christ is foreshadowed by miraculously born life, pointing to the central message of Christ, that he is here to give us eternal life. The miraculous births foreshadow the supernatural life that Christ gives through the self-sacrificial outpouring of his life for us upon the Cross.
The Second Reading for this Sunday highlights that in order for us to receive new life through Christ, we must first die to our old lives in this world. We must completely reorient our whole being. We must undergo a thoroughgoing transformation, making Christ the absolute center of our being. This transformation beings in baptism, continues in Confirmation, and is perfected continually through our union with Christ in the Holy Eucharist, as well as through the whole sacramental and prayer life of the Church.
A key part of this transformation is to take up our Cross, to stop living our lives for our own selfish goals and instead to live to love others with God's love. Ironically, the more we let go of our selfish desires and the more we take up our Cross, the more joy we experience in this life. That is the paradox of love. The more we let go of our ego and live a life of sharing Christ's love with others in a self-sacrificial way, the more our lives are filled with love and an abiding sense of peace.
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The readings for Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A are:
2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a
Psalm 89:2-3, 16-17, 18-19
Romans 6:3-4, 8-11
Matthew 10:37-42
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Image Credit: Christ the King Statue 2, from Wikimedia Commons.
