EVANGELICAL RADICALISM

What are the conditions for following Jesus? The Gospel passage for this Sunday highlights four of them: preferential love for Christ, taking up the cross, wisdom and discernment in measuring one’s own strength, and the renunciation of possessions. We will now focus on the first: love for Christ. Let’s give a more literal translation: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). We prefer this rendering of the text because of the Greek verb miséo which can be translated as “to hate” or “to detest”. It is clear that we are dealing with a Semitism, and that the verb should be understood as “to love less” or “he who does not prefer me to” or “does not love me more than he loves his father…”. However, it should not be toned down just because of its provocative force. Jesus knows very well that parents must be loved and that affections have their importance, but he asks for a preferential love, a love so all-encompassing that it even puts life on hold. But who is Jesus to ask this? Tremblay states that “it is the divine identity that allows Jesus to push the demands of following to such an extreme. No man on this earth, unless he is a pernicious megalomaniac, can justify the claim of being for others an essential point of reference for the success of their life in this world and in the next”. So we can say that the response to the Master’s invitation is a true confession of faith. Whoever loves his own life more than Christ, who, in the Father, is the author of life, will never be able to know what it means to love life and to be loved by life. And whoever does not love life cannot be a cause of happiness for others. Whoever loves only the people who nourish his heart more than the One who created him and created the people of his emotional world, will never be able to know what it means to love the Creator and to feel loved by Him. And can someone who does not love his Creator truly love someone?

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey