From the Parish House

I remember one weekday morning being unusually late leaving home to get to morning Mass and being unprepared.  I arrived in the sacristy and hurriedly vested for Mass.  As I processed into the Church I noticed that the Prep Teacher had decided to bring a class of Prep children to Church that morning.  I was even more regretful that I had been running late for Mass and not even read the gospel in advance and prepared some thoughts.  When it came time for the gospel I approached the lectern wondering which section of Luke’s Gospel we were reading that day.  I knew we were up to Chapter thirteen or fourteen.  Reaching the lectern, I looked down at the page and then began reading: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple.  Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”  I finished reading the gospel and looked down at twenty confused little faces staring back at me from the front row!

This is the same gospel that we are presented with this weekend.  Since that day I have paid much more attention to this text.  I have read more about it and still seek to make sense of it.   Translation can be hard, and of course the original text of Luke was written in Greek.  I now know that the word ‘hate’ (miseo in Greek) does not mean to actively despise.  It is better understood in the sense of being inclined to disfavour or disregard in contrast to giving preferential treatment.  In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is talking to the crowds who were accompanying him on his way to Jerusalem.  Luke is preparing the reader for what it might mean to follow the way of Jesus.  He is preparing them for the conflict that they may find themselves in if they welcome the stranger, show compassion to the sinner or eat with the socially unacceptable.  It may even mean that in a culture where family respectability was so important that the way of Jesus, (and thus the way of the living God), could lead to disputes and tensions even with our own family.  It’s not that Jesus seriously wants us to hate our families. It is that he calls all who follow him to tie themselves to the new family of the those who are committed to the dream of God for a new world.  I like the way that one gospel commentator, Mitzi Smith, puts things: “Perhaps what Jesus means by hating family is to refuse to live by narrow, exclusive ideas of family when it comes to meeting human needs and contributing to the wholeness of all human beings.”

And actually children can help us to understand this.  Don’t children and teenagers have a sense of when things are unfair or discriminatory.  Don’t young people at times challenge their parents and other adults in their families to think about their prejudices and the way that they view the world.  The voices of children and young people can often throw our narrow and exclusive way of seeing the world into question.  In this way they are joining Jesus in today’s gospel in asking us where our fundamental preferences for life lay.  For the family of those who follow Christ a preferential option for the poor, for the earth as our common home and for all human life to flourish sits above the sometimes narrower, even if profound, love we have for our families.

I think even prep children can grasp that.

By:  Fr Brendan Reed