14 July 2025 – Monday of the 15th week
H O M E L Y
This Gospel is a little confusing – as the Gospel often is. The last part, about welcoming others, and in particular welcoming Christ's messenger, is reassuring and easy to understand. The central part of the text, however, stating that ‘He who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’ is more difficult to understand. It is as if there were a competition between the two loves. Yet this is not consistent with the image of God that Jesus usually gives us.
The whole passage is preceded by a first part in which Jesus says: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth... I have come to separate a man from his father, a daughter from her mother... a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.’ This is certainly not an easy text either, but its meaning is clear. The meaning is that the peace that Jesus came to bring to the world is not ‘peace at any price.’ It is not peace ‘as the world gives it.’ It is not peace that consists of compromise with the established order, even when that established order is made up of injustice and oppression of the weakest and smallest. It is not the peace proclaimed by false prophets who desire only to be accepted and honoured, but rather the peace proclaimed by true prophets, a peace that is the fruit of the restoration of a just order, and which is echoed in the Magnificat: "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly... He fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty-handed."
Anyone who has chosen to serve God and not Mammon – anyone who has chosen to live according to the precepts of the Gospel and to accept all the consequences – can expect that in certain circumstances this choice will put him at odds with those around him and sometimes even with hisr closest relatives, including his parents or children. This is where Jesus' words come in: ‘If anyone loves his father or mother more than me, he is not worthy of me.’ Apart from this situation of conflict and forced choice between the Gospel and its opposite, it is obvious that there can be no opposition or even tension between the love of God and the love of parents—the latter being in fact only an expression of the former.
The Son of God gave Himself entirely to His mission. According to the Letter to the Philippians (ch. 2), He did not want to ‘cling’ to His equality with God; He emptied Himself; He renounced all His rights to become one of us; and that is why the Father exalted Him... So it is for us, Jesus tells us. Those who want to keep their lives, that is, those who cling to their lives as private property and are completely withdrawn into themselves, have already lost their lives, because their lives are now empty of meaning. But whoever accepts the cross, who accepts to live the conflicts that arise from fidelity to the Gospel, who accepts to conform his life to the Gospel even if it means choosing between Jesus and his loved ones, that person already possesses life in its fullness – even if, in some cases, it may lead to physical death.
To those who followed Him in this spirit, to His Apostles, Jesus gave the affectionate name of ‘little ones.’ It is of them that He speaks when He says that whoever gives even a simple glass of water to ‘one of these little ones’ will not lose his reward. That person, says Jesus, will have the reward of a prophet. The expression ‘a prophet's reward’ does not mean the reward that befits a prophet, but rather the reward that one receives from a prophet—a true prophet like Elisha—who brings life wherever He goes. Just as ‘a righteous man's reward’ means the reward that one receives from a righteous man.
This Gospel is very demanding. It calls us to hospitality, to welcoming others, especially the little ones, but also to ‘orderly’ hospitality, where we know how to establish an order of importance and choose Christ whenever circumstances or people force us to choose between Him and something else or Him and other people, even if it means taking up the cross, that is, even if it means entering into full possession of life by losing it.
Armand Veilleux