God is love. But you must hate your mother and brother, or you cannot be Christ’s disciples. Why so much contradiction?
Jesus Christ is the love of the Father incarnate but we all know he wasn’t all about the warm fuzzies all the time.
We hear Jesus say that certain people are not worthy of the kingdom of God. In particular, in his parable about the rich man throwing a sumptuous banquet: those invitees who nonchalantly couldn’t find the time to attend were met with fly-off-the-handle anger from the host of the party, who stopped just short of saying they would rot in hell (where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth).
These passages are unsettling. Is this the same Jesus we rely upon as the inexhaustible fount of mercy when we’ve been lazy, unloving, or selfish? Yikes. What could he possibly be trying to say with these parables? And should we be afraid?
No. Jesus doesn’t want us to be afraid.
But he does want us to be motivated and magnanimous with the mercy we have received. Jesus places demands on us. His love is completely free, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make demands. If you have encountered the liberating love of Christ, your life from that moment on must be a litany of all that Christ has done for you. There is no half-heartedness in heaven. The Gospel cannot be semi-embraced.
Catherine Doherty, the foundress of the Madonna House apostolate, writes that “living the Catholic faith is a way of life that embraces every minute of our waking and sleeping hours; it permeates our lives at work, at home, in school, on a date, from the cradle to the grave.”
When someone grasps that their lives have been saved, they overflow with gratitude and can’t say enough about the mercy shown them. But if ten people were miraculously cured of a debilitating, abhorrent disease (leprosy) and only one person had the urge to turn around and say thank you to the healer, the healer could rightfully wonder if the other nine desired to be in a relationship at all, let alone live together with him in paradise forever.
Let’s not leave room for Jesus to wonder about our love.
We can simply say “I love you” to our beloved. And that will suffice. But imagine the possibilities, the endless ways we can demonstrate our love! With our actions and our diligence, we can convincingly say, “I will never leave you. Everything I have is yours. I want to pour my life out for you. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to show you my love.”
Being saved is the very first step in our relationship with Jesus. The rest is a dance between us, an investing of talents instead of burying them, the continual choosing of God’s will over our own, a constant striving to emulate Mary’s great fiat.
The beautiful thing is that we need to simply speak into the heart of Jesus with childlike simplicity and tell him we are trying our best. Please, Jesus, supply for what is lacking in my love. Increase my faith and my fortitude to persevere. I want to give my all for you, but apathy and lethargy threaten at every turn. Do not let me become someone who “professes you with my lips but whose heart is far from you.”
These are prayers to pray in these days where there is so much competition for our allegiance and so many outlets promise us the comfort and security for which we long. The only rest and comfort we will find is in giving ourselves away, unreservedly, to Jesus and availing ourselves of the great mission he has for our lives.
