Luke
14:25-33
Back in 2004, the BBC reported that an
80-year-old retired man was seeking adoption. Widowed for 14 years and lonely,
Giorgio Angelozzi placed an ad in his local Italian newspaper, searching for a
family willing to adopt him as a grandparent. The response was overwhelming.
Families all over Italy, along with some as far away as New Zealand, were
willing to take him up on his offer. In time, Angelozzi chose the Italian Riva
family because, he said, the mother had a melodious voice that reminded him of
the voice of his wife. And the Rivas said they hoped that the elderly man would
fill a gap for their children, whose grandfather had recently died.
Now this would be a sweet story if it
ended here - a lonely old man with a new family to love and a family with a new
grandfather. But I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t. About a year later,
Angelozzi was in the news again. It turns out that the blended family never
really bonded. Angelozzi was authoritarian and the children were not that
interested in him. Then there were his irritating habits. The old man followed the mother around all day long. He
stuck chewing gum under the furniture. And worse than that he ran up a large
bill with the family dentist after the Rivas had already paid for new glasses
and an operation. When the Rivas told Angelozzi he would have to settle things
with the dentist, he skipped town. Eventually the police located him in a rest
home and along finding his location uncovered a history of fraud, theft,
bitterness, and alienation from his original family.
Shortly thereafter Angelozzi died. There
were no flowers, no cards, no phone calls. Not a single relative even offered
to claim his body. But in the end, his adopted family, the Rivas came through.
They organized a funeral and covered the cost. The mother, Marlena, was quoted
as saying, “How can we ask God for forgiveness for our sins one day if we do
not pardon [Angelozzi]?”
Seems to me that that is a very
Christ-like response. And yet in our gospel reading from Luke, Jesus seems to
be saying quite the opposite when it comes to family. “Whoever comes to me and
does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters…
cannot be my disciple.” Tough words. Who is this Jesus? Isn’t he the one who
commands us over and over and over again to love? So what is all this hating
about?
Well, it’s about using hyperbole to get
our attention, which Jesus is prone to do now and again. So let’s pay attention
- and let’s also know that when Jesus uses the word “hate,” he’s not talking
about hatred as we may think of it. He’s not talking about despising anyone or
denying someone love. Because, in fact, this type of hatred has nothing to do
with emotions or feelings. For Jesus, hating is about priorities. It’s about
making sure that relationships and loyalties are ordered in the best way
possible.
Because, you already know this, Jesus
isn’t anti-family. But he is “anti-” anything we put in place of total
commitment to God. And here, when he is saying that we must hate various family
members, he is highlighting to us the truth that loving one’s blood family
wrongly—meaning giving your family or anything else a higher priority than God
—will not do.
Now for some, the idea of cutting a
branch off the family tree may come as welcome news. It has been said,
“Happiness is having a large, loving, close-knit family… in another city.” But
even to those of us who are lucky enough to have healthy family ties, Jesus
tells us that even those relationships need to be subordinate to our
relationship with God. That we need to love God more. And that’s not for God’s
sake, but for ours. Because it turns out that loving God first in our lives is
actually good news for us and for all those we love.
Good news because God is Love and is the
source of all love. So when God comes first - when God is at the center of our
lives - we experience a transformation that enables us to love others,
including our family, more perfectly. Because more often than not, the way we
love, or at least the way I love, is far from perfect. I get frustrated with
the ones I love. I can lose my patience or seek to control them or sometimes
even say hurtful things. My love isn’t always pure. It can be mixed with a need
to be loved back or a desire to feel secure. I try my best, but on my own, my
love all too often is imperfect - and probably yours is too.
But when we start with the source, when
we seek to love God first - or really what it is is getting in touch with how
much we are already loved by God, loved and treasured unconditionally - then we
are filled with that perfect love and better able to love others. And this
isn’t just pop psychology. St. Augustine, one of the early Church Fathers,
writes extensively about ordering our loves. How our lives get out of sync and
disordered when we put someone or something that is created above the creator
in our hearts. But when we love God first and foremost everything else falls
into place. It’s a bit ironic, but when God comes before all others we can
actually love everyone and everything better - without agendas, anxieties, and
demands - but rather with delight and generosity and appreciation and
gratitude.
But how do we love a God whom we can not
actually see or hear or touch? Well, certainly by loving others with a
generous, merciful love, but also, as the writer C.S. Lewis puts it, “[by
chasing] the sunbeam back up to the sun.” In the sense that we can love God
first by tracing the things that we love in this world back to their source in
God. For all of creation is made up of these streams that flow to us from the
fountain of God’s uncreated and unending goodness. As we are reminded in the
book of James, “...Every good gift is from above, coming down from the Father
of lights…” (1:17).
By seeking to love God first in our lives
we are, as Moses puts it in our Old Testament reading, choosing life. Life for
us. Life for those whom we love. Life that lets God's perfect love flow. From
all reports it seems like the Riva family, the family who ended up being burned
by the conniving would-be grandfather, did their best to let that love flow.
May we do so as well - not by hating, of course, but by loving - loving God
first so that we might love others well and live.
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