23rd Sunday OT Year ’C’
"Great crowds accompanied Jesus on his way; he turned and spoke to them : ’Anyone who comes to me without hating father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and his own life, cannot be my disciples.
No one who does not carry his cross and come after me can be my disciple."
Jesus speaks to the crowds on the road with him to Jerusalem. The affective links we have come to us as a gift from God. In order to follow Jesus we must amplify them so that they join the very Love of Christ walking towards his Passion - this is the real aspect of his life that saves us.
God’s Word is alive, it gives life and we want to take it very seriously. Jesus knows that our human nature is in need of an aim. If the reality we are seeking is not very well adjusted to God, the building in our life is likely to crumble down.
Our existence’s ’finality’ is it attraction for the Father : ’If someone loves me, he will keep my Word, my Father will come to me and we shall make our dwelling place in him.’
If we place God at the first place in our lives then it becomes an ardent home and so all our loves are very well situated. We can indeed fall into the trap of replacing God by our preoccupations without even realising it.
The spiritual combat is a harsh one, for we put ourselves at the heart of our own life, now, when God doesn’t have the first place in our lives we see how difficult life is, indeed, impossible. We ask Jesus for the grace to prefer nothing other than Himself.
“And indeed, which one of you here, intending to build a tower, would not first sit down and work out the cost to see if he had enough to complete it? Otherwise, if he laid the foundation and then found himself unable to finish the work, anyone who saw it started making fun of him, and saying’ Here is someone who started to build and was unable to finish.”
We come back to our senses, we must do with what we have!
Jesus lead us into a deep reflection :’Give up anything which prevents us from being his disciple.’
Jesus speaks these words to us all, wherever we live in the world. He carries within himself an unbelievable Love and he is ever surprising us. We feel good at his side, for we have the experience of a charity, how good it is to be with Him in this Love The simple fact of being in his company transforms us and we have this .
In His Presence we build up our life on the rock and he gets the lame to stand, gives the blind one back his sight, the deaf their hearing! He frees wounded humanity. Everything Jesus does, it is the Holy Spirit who does it in Him. This Holy Spirit is the Infinite Love of God coming together with our own spirit to cry out ’Abba! Father!’
"Or again what king marching to war against another king would not first sit down and consider whether with ten thousand men he could stand up to the other who was advancing against him with twenty thousand? If not, then whilst the other king was till a long way off, he would send envoys to sue for peace.
So in the same way, none of you can be my disciples without giving up all that he owns."
Humanity never has enough with building and going to war, but with Jesus, when we follow Him we always have too much. We can become closed up on ourselves in the desire to always have more, but Jesus leads us in the adventure of faith.
Our very prudence changes when we have the ambition to serve Jesus.
To love God with all our strength, become Jesus’ disciple is what is urgent in our life.
Sacrificing everything so as to join God who loves us, and to work at his Kingdom is the sensible answer, the true wealth which strips us of our miseries. In the Holy Spirit, all of our relationships are changed and we can enter into spiritual combat.
’God the Father has so loved the world that he has given his only Son.’
We ask for our faith to grow, for our hope to be intensified, that our charity may be revitalised so that we may be Living people.