Daily Mass Gospel Reflection- First Love

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 9.4.22 | Bishop Robert Barron

[MurphsLaw]

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Luke 14:25–33

Friends, in our Gospel today,
the Lord offers one of the greatest, most “slap you in the face” challenges he ever offered.
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother . . .
and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

There is the great spiritual principle that undergirds the entire Gospel:
detachment.
The heart of the spiritual life is to love God
and then to love everything else for the sake of God.
But we sinners, as St. Augustine said,
fall into the trap of loving the creature and forgetting the Creator.
That’s when we get off the rails.

We treat something less than God as God—and trouble ensues.
And this is why Jesus tells his fair-weather fans that they have a very stark choice to make.
Jesus must be loved first and last,
and everything else in their lives has to find its meaning in relation to him.

In typical Semitic fashion, he makes this point through a stark exaggeration:
“Unless you hate your father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters . . .”
Well yes, hate them in the measure that they have become gods to you.
For precisely in that measure are they dangerous.

[MurphsLaw]

+++ Great crowds were traveling with
Jesus,
and he turned and addressed them, “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.
Whoever does not carry his own cross
and come after me
cannot be my disciple.
Which of you wishing to
construct a tower
does not first sit down and
calculate the cost
to see if there is enough
for its completion?
Otherwise, after laying the
foundation
and finding himself unable to finish
the work
the onlookers should laugh at him
and say,
‘This one began to build but did not
have the resources to finish.’
Or what king marching into
battle
would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty
thousand troops?
But if not, while he is still far away,
he will send a delegation
to ask for peace terms.
In the same way,
anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple.”+++