There are many places in the Gospels where Jesus used tough harsh words to catch the attention of his listeners. In today’s gospel he says that we cannot be his disciples if we come to him without hating father and mother,wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even our own lives.
What kind of talk is this? Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore the Fourth commandment and no longer honor our parents, noris he telling us to literally sell our possessions. Jesus often used hyperboles to illustrate the costly demands of being one of His disciples, which is often overlooked.
To be a disciple of Christ means to make time first for the things of God and live beyond the insignificant things that we throw into our lives. When Jesus speaks about hating father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters and even our own lives, he is using apocalyptic language, which is shocking, telling us to hate anything and anyone that causes us to lose our focus on Him.
Last Thursday marked the 22nd anniversary of the death of St. Teresa of Calcutta. Many of us have been blessed with being witnesses to her life. We all saw how she would not allow anything to get in the way of her serving God. She and her sisters would spend hours in prayer so they could spend hours serving God’s presence in others. In her own way, Mother Teresa taught us today’s gospel: we need to hate anything that could keep us from being a disciple of Christ, including the perceptions we have of ourselves.
Many stories exist about this saint but I suspect that you haven’t heard this one. Fr. John Fullenbach, a theologian, contacted Mother Teresa’s sisters in Calcutta and asked if he could join them for a few weeks. They welcomed him to join their work. He flew to Calcutta, found the Missionaries of Charities’ hospice, and had just finished telling the sister in charge that he was willing to do anything they needed to be done, when another sister came running in saying that there was a man dying on the streets. The sister in charge turned to him and said, “Father, could you please go with her and bring the man back here to the hospice?”
Fr. Fullenbach followed the sister through the back alleys of Calcutta, in and out of narrow streets, and finally came upon what looked from the distance to be a heap of dirty rags. It was the dying man. Fr. Fullenbach bent over him and tried to comfort him and told him that he was going to take him to a nice, clean place where he could be cared for. The man opened his eyes; saw that it was a priest talking to him, and spit in his face. The priest felt a rage rising up within him.
He came all the way from Rome to help these people. And this man responded by spitting on him. The sister explained that most of the people on the streets are not Catholic, but we still need to care for them. So, Fr. Fullenbach picked the man up and carried him back to the hospice where the man was cleaned, given fresh clothes, fed a bowl of soup, and put on a bed to die with dignity.
The sisters then asked Father to help out by rolling up some clean strips of cloth that could be used for bandages. He was doing this for about an hour, rolling the strips, and still feeling upset over the man spitting on him. Suddenly the whole hospice shook with the screams of a little girl. On the other side of the room there was a poor little girl, about nine, and covered in sores. She was standing in a basin of water as one of the young sisters was trying to clean her, bathe her sores. The little girl was enraged, hysterical, throwing a fit. She kept screaming and kicking and splashing the sister. Fr. Fullenbach was watching this horrible scene when he noticed that everyone was looking at one of the doors.
There stood Mother Teresa. She had heard the racket and was coming in. She started walking to the little girl. “Well,” Fr. Fullenbach thought, “Now we’ll see what a saint is made of.” As she approached the little girl, she waved the young sister away. The girl saw her and kept screaming, and then began splashing Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa kept walking towards her, very slowly, with a smile of love on her face. By the time she got to the girl, she was drenched, but she didn’t seem to mind. Instead, she just kept smiling. Then she held out her arms. The child fell into them and just cried and cried and cried. Mother Teresa let her cry for as long as she wanted. Then the little girl let Mother Teresa wash her and put clean clothes on her. Fr. Fullenbach said to himself, “And that is what a saint is made of.”
Our lesson is this: we need to hate all that keeps us from the Lord and love all that brings us closer to him for nothing is more important than serving God. Not our stuff, not our likes, not our perceived position among our peers, not even the people in our lives. We must not allow anything to stand in the way of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. The price of discipleship is total commitment so consider those parts of your life that are actually tearing you away from Christ.
Simply put, if being one of his disciples really matters to you, then faith must be your priority, otherwise, your relationship with Jesus could grow shallow. Through the intercession of St. Teresa of Calcutta, may we have the spiritual strength we need to truly be one of the Lord’s disciples.