First Sunday after Pentecost: All Saints Sunday; The Holy Prophet Amos; Venerable Jerome, Presbyter of Stridonium.
Hebrews 11:33-12:2; Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38; 19:27-30.
Read Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38; 19:27-30
Culture is the most powerful influence in our lives. It contains assumptions about what we understand the world to be and how to behave in it. Even religion is transmitted to us through culture. There is no other way for that to be possible; communication would be unintelligible otherwise. But what if some human cultural assumptions, instead of being a vehicle for communicating religious truth, get in the way of it? How can we break through the habits of thought of someone we are trying to reach with information that goes against their most cherished assumptions? How would someone break through ours?
Today’s reading from Matthew’s gospel is jarring enough – Jesus’s categorical expectation that we love him more than our closest family members. Luke’s parallel gospel uses hyperbole – exaggeration to make a point – saying that we must “hate” our family members to be Jesus’s disciples. That gets our attention!
Jesus loves our family members and calls us to do so as well. He is not asking us to do otherwise. He is echoing Micah 7 in which people and their culture enshrine the opposite of what God has called them to, in which “a man’s enemies are the men of his own house. But as for me, I will look to the Lord.” The intent of this gospel reading is not that we judge our family members; its intent is that we examine our own allegiances and align them with God who, in referencing this Old Testament scripture, Jesus identifies as himself.