SUNDAY 13 (A)
Mt 10,37-42
The Semitic way of speaking, through exclusive contrasts, can play a trick on us. The Gospel proposes, in concise formulas, several essential themes for the following of Jesus. All of them have greater scope than might be suspected.
Whoever loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. The love of mother and the love of God are realities of a different nature; they cannot be compared. Jesus could not have said that with the meaning it has for us today. The love of God cannot come into conflict with the love of anyone, and least of all with the love of mother.
One must be very careful when speaking of love for God or for Jesus. To believe that I can love God directly is a chimera. I can only love God by loving others. Jesus could not have said: you must love me more than the Son. Let us remember: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink”.
There is no love other than that which comes to be concretized in works. Now then, what is closest to each human being are the members of his own family. The warning of the Gospel is aimed at making us see that deploying those instinctive impulses to the fullest does not guarantee the slightest degree of human quality. But it would be an even greater error to believe that they can be contrary to my humanity.
The Gospel does not mean that love for children or parents is bad and that we must forget it in order to love Jesus or God. But it warns us that such love can be a disguised selfishness that seeks greater security for the ego, without taking God and others into account. That “love” is amplified selfishness.
Man can set as his objective the exclusive deployment of his animality, thus curtailing his human possibilities. This is to degrade himself in his true being, by putting his mind at the service of instinct. If we are in that dynamic and we put others into it, we are “loving” poorly, and that love becomes poison.
True love can never oppose another authentic love. When a husband finds himself trapped between love for his mother and love for his wife, something is not functioning well. One of those loves (or both) is defective. If love for God is in contradiction with love for father or mother, both can be false.
Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will find it. In Greek there are three words to say life: “Zoe”, “bios” and “psyche”. The text does not say zoe or bios, but psyche. It is not about biological life, nor about psychological life. It would not be a matter of allowing oneself to be killed, but of putting your humanity at the service of others.
This would not be to lose anything, but to gain everything. Whoever tries to defend at all costs his selfish individuality will spoil all aspects of his existence, because he will pass through it without deploying his true essence. My humanity does not respond to a selfish vision of my being; it is inextricably united to that of others.
Evolution has allowed the human being to go beyond instincts and consciously achieve a higher goal that is not in contradiction with biology. Everything that brings him closer to that ultimate objective can cause him more happiness than satisfying his instincts. Nothing is more false than the struggle between the biological and the spiritual.
The trap is to remain in the immediate pleasure that our biology provides us and lose sight of the total good of the human being. That is the cause of so much maladjustment in human conduct. We must become aware that what is bad for our true being cannot be good under any aspect of the human being.
Fray Marcos