Post-feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God; Saturday before the Exaltation of the Cross; Our Venerable Mother Theodora of Alexandria (474-91)
1 Corinthians 2:6-9; Matthew 10:37-11:1
Read Matthew 10:37-11:1
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
One of the most over-used and misused words in our modern world is the word “love.” We can love chocolate, rock-and-roll artists, our wives, or God all with the same word. This world gives us many opportunities to find objects of our love. It also provides us many opportunities to give our hearts away, sometimes in a self-seeking manner.
The two criteria to ensure that we are loving appropriately are given to us by our Lord. Firstly, we must love God above all other loves. Even relationships of appropriate love, like that of familial love, is subordinated to the love of God first. Secondly, real love always includes sacrifice. A cross is inseparable from truly following Christ. If we are unwilling to embrace it and stay on it, we are unwilling to truly love Christ. We cannot clutch to our own life and embrace the true life and love offered to us by Jesus.
In commenting on this passage, St. John Chrysostom writes:
See how great is the impairment to those who have an exaggerated love for their own life. And how great is the blessing to those who are ready to give up their lives for a well-ordered love! So he bids his disciples to be willing to give up parents, children, natural relationships, kinships, the world and even their own lives. How onerous are these injunctions! But then he immediately sets forth the greater blessings of rightly ordered love. Thus these instructions, Jesus says, are so far from harming that they in fact are of greatest benefit. It is their opposites that injure. He then counsels them, as he so often does, in accord with the very desires that they already possess. Why should you be willing to give up your life? Only because you love it inordinately. So for the very reason of loving it ordinately, you will scorn loving it inordinately, and so it will be to your advantage to the highest degree. You will then in the truest sense love your life. (Homily on Gospel of Matthew 35.2)