Wednesday of the Thirty-First Week in Ordinary Time
How to follow Jesus
Great crowds were traveling with him, and he turned and addressed them, “If any one 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. Lk 14,25-27
How could Jesus ask to his disciples to be loved more than the wife and the children? Is it an acceptable request? Of course this is an extreme decision, to be taken only if the spouse and the family clearly oppose to a path to follow the Lord together. In this case, without abdicating to his role and his family commitments, the person has to travel alone, praying that the remaining of the family makes the same choice at a later time. This will happen if the family will realize that the journey of faith has made us better, even in the way we play our role within the family. However, the call of Jesus to be preferred to the wife and the children has theological and biblical motivations which date back to the start of the times, when “God created man in his image …. male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying: ‘Be fertile and multiply’ ” (Gn 1,27-28). The man and woman were created to become the image of God in the union and in the procreation; hence, to the extent to which the marriage and the family remain in God, the blessing continues: ” God blessed them”. Because Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God and God himself, to prefer the family to him means to lose sight of God again, as it happened at the beginning of the times. One family, however, which is constituted and lives in the Lord, is linked to God as it was before the original sin. This is a decision to be made, being aware that there is no going back. You can not even do any program, as generally you do when you prepare a project: you have just to start! But we know that ultimately the success will be guaranteed, because the project is placed in the hands of the Lord.