23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel Reflection

Luke 14:25-33

Many of Our Lord’s teachings or   confidences are expressed with words of tenderness and love. Yet others seem to be “hard sayings”, being sharp in their language, challenging or difficult to understand. The first reading taken from the Book of Wisdom provides an explanation why this is so. It is largely due to the weakness of our fallen human nature and the way we perceive things. The way we think is often affected by strong emotions, by sinful habits, or by pride. At the very least there is the fact that we tend to judge things in a self-centered if not selfish way.

On the contrary, God’s knowledge and intentions are above these kinds of limitations. His wisdom in infinite and his intentions in relation to ourselves as his children are always just, generous and holy. “As for your intention, who could have learnt it, had you not granted wisdom and sent your holy spirit from above?” we hear in the first reading. To grasp these more difficult teachings, we need to ask God, with sincere humility and trust, for greater wisdom.

We might want to imagine the occasion mentioned in today’s Gospel. A great number of people are walking along the road as Our Lord travels from one village to another. Most are not committed disciples but rather people who are hoping for a cure of some illness or for some sign to be worked by Our Lord. Others are curious with little else to do than to join the crowd and relieve their boredom. At a certain moment, Jesus turns around and shakes their muddled minds with a striking statement. “If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple” Then he goes on to tell the parables Luke records for us. These may have intrigued many as if they were riddles. But many others must have realized some deep lesson was contained in them. We know how later it was not uncommon for the apostles and other  disciples to question Our Lord about the meaning of such parables.

The parables, as found in Luke, are recounted between the strong statement above and these final similar words of Jesus . “So…none of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.” Our Lord teaches us that the way to our eternal salvation must pass through the realization that nothing is to be preferred to God and that anything that could separate us from Him must be despised.

Jesus was the one who most loved His own mother and who reminded us of the commandment to honour our parents and care for them in their needs. But here he alerts us to how a disordered attachment to others, to possessions and to self acts as a obstacle to our own eternal happiness. The parables suggest how a person might try to seek their own  happiness in a selfish way, to build their ivory tower in order to then live in it indefinitely. But of course, this is impossible, as death will come sooner or later. Such a person is bound to feel that they never really achieved that enduring sense of self-satisfaction. Or a person might adopt a defensive, even a warring attitude against God and what life presents them with. In either case what results is a delusion and an acting against what really constitutes a person’s way of sanctification and fulfillment, which is attained through the love of God and the grace that inspires it. In fact, whatever adversities life presents and whatever challenges, these are permitted by God as means of purification and growth. Such is the meaning of taking up one’s cross each day, to follow Christ, who bore his Cross for us.