Peace be with you.
You know, friends, something that
I find really puzzling: whenever people say,
“Old Christianity, ordinary old-fashioned,
everyday old Christianity.”
The one thing Christianity is not
is runof-the-mill or ordinary.
In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and
say something here.
There is no religious figure anywhere
in the religions or philosophies of the world,
none, who is stranger and more demanding,
more relentless and more unnerving than Jesus.
I’ll say that again.
There is no guru, teacher, founder,
nobody, who’s as strange and relentless as Jesus.
And therefore the religion attached to Jesus is the
strangest of them all.
Now, I’m going to put exhibit A to you today,
and it’s from our Gospel, Matthew chapter 10.
Jesus says to his Apostles, listen,
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me
is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me
is not worthy of me.”
Okay, let me get this straight.
So the most intense loves that we have
—the love of a child for parents,
the love for your mother, your father,
or turn it around, the love of a parent
for a child,
maybe that’s even more intense.
The connection that a father will feel for
a daughter or son.
The mother’s intensity of love for her children,
having, mind you, both a kind of internal quality
and an external obligation.
I mean, a parent would say,
“Well, this is the most important obligation of my life.”
I’ve known lots of people of my own generation
who became parents, and I knew them when
they were goofball teenagers and all that,
and they become parents and something happens.
I mean, once that child arrives,
they are different because now that child is everything to me.
I’ll give my life to protect that child.
Think of a little kid and their love for their parents,
the intensity of that connection.
Think of the external obligation in that sense,
going from child to parent.
When the parent gets old and infirm and needy,
and the children feel legitimately this extraordinary obligation
to care for their parents.
Jesus is on purpose here summoning the most powerful
affect that we have in us.
But then listen to it.
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me
is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter . . .”
Again, think of a young father,
just had a child, and those feelings of
passionate connection.
I’ll die for you.
That feeling that the father has for a child.
“Whoever loves son or daughter more than me
is not worthy of me.”
Now, I submit to you, everybody,
the Buddha would not say this.
He wouldn’t.
I mean, the Buddha has teachings for us,
and he’d say,
“Here’s the eightfold path, and I followed it and found
happiness and you can too.”
Muhammad wouldn’t say this.
No, no.
He’d say, “I received this revelation from the angel,
and I wrote it down. It’s the Quran.”
He wouldn’t say this.
Moses wouldn’t say this.
Confucius wouldn’t say this.
Aristotle wouldn’t say it.
Plato wouldn’t say it.
I don’t know anybody in the philosophical or
religious tradition who would say such a strange thing.
But Jesus says it.
Your love for me personally
has to go beyond the most intense
loves of your life.
“I’d happily die for this child.”
Yeah, but you need to love me more than that.
Now you see the point I’m making, everybody,
and why I speak of the strangeness of Christianity.
This is every bit as high a Christology
as the prologue to John.
“In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was with God.
The Word was God.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
We say, yeah, John’s telling us that Jesus is God.
Well, Jesus is saying the same thing here,
just using a somewhat different rhetorical style
and symbol system.
I mean, who is the one who should be loved
beyond the most intense loves you possibly have?
Well, God, only God.
“Oh, Jesus, he’s a very interesting teacher.
Boy, I find him a fascinating moral exemplar.”
Well, that’s completely out of step with this.
You might imagine a teacher saying,
“Unless you love the God that I speak of,
unless you love the teaching that I offer . . .”
But he wouldn’t say this
unless he himself in person
were the highest good.
Let me say that again.
He wouldn’t say this unless he himself in person
were the very highest good.
That’s what’s at stake in Christianity.
That’s what’s at stake.
You can’t be neutral about this,
which is precisely why the same Jesus says
“the one who’s not with me is against me.
Either you gather with me or you scatter.”
You have to make a decision about Jesus.
That’s what he’s telling us here.
This is the ethical correlate to the claim
that Jesus is divine.
Okay, so you’re saying,
“All right, that’s a lot to deal with.
That’s a lot to take in.”
Well, he doesn’t let up.
Listen as he goes on:
“Whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.”
Okay, so you’re telling me I have to love you,
Lord, more than I love my own children,
more than I love my own parents.
Mm-hm.
That’s what I mean.
That’s exactly what I mean.
And now you’re saying,
unless you take up your cross every day
and follow me, you’re not worthy of me.
Mm-hm.
I want you to see something.
Obviously, we now associate the cross,
taking up the cross, with suffering,
accepting the pain of life and doing so with equanimity
and blitheness of spirit.
Yeah, but that’s not what he’s saying here.
Like hey, when bad things happen,
offer it up to God and accept it in
a patient spirit.
That’s not what he’s saying.
He’s saying, unless you “take up your cross.”
Take up your cross.
In other words, seek it out
on your own. You do it.
Don’t just accept it given to you from the outside.
You take up the cross.
See, what does he mean now?
Well, just as Jesus took up his cross so that he might
bear the sins of the world and thereby take them away,
just as he suffered the death that we were owed,
just as he bore our burdens,
so we are actively to bear the burdens of others.
Again, I get it.
Suffering happens to all of us willy-nilly,
and yes indeed, we should always accept it
in an attitude of patience and accepting God’s will, etc.,
but that’s not what he’s talking about.
He means you who follow me, you who love me
more than you love your own children,
you need every day to bear
other people’s burdens and to do so actively.
Seek out opportunities to bear the burden of somebody else.
What if you were to begin your day that way?
Instead of saying,
“Okay, how am I going to make more money today or
become more popular today or become more successful today?”
Instead of asking those questions, ask,
“Where is someone right now who’s carrying a burden around,
and what can I do to lighten it?
Whose cross can I pick up the way Simon of Cyrene
helped Jesus carry his cross?”
Hey, you love me more than your own children.
Yeah, I do, Lord.
I’m trying to anyway. I’m trying to.
Okay, okay.
Here’s the test.
Are you willing every day to do this?
Because if you don’t,
you’re actually not worthy of me.
Is there anything else?
I’m saying it on purpose that way just to show
how dramatic this is, how dramatic this is.
The marvelous demand that Jesus places upon us
to do what he did,
to bear the burdens of others.
Now, listen to how this is summed up:
“Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
There’s that law of spiritual physics.
What does it mean to find your life?
It means I’m going to get it.
I’m going to grab it, make it my own.
I’m going to fill up my emptiness with all
these goods of the world.
I’m going to find my life.
Think of how many voices you know around you who say,
I made my way.
I made my fortune.
I established my career.
Yeah, okay, okay, okay.
That’s called having your life,
finding your life.
What’s going to happen?
You’ll lose that.
It’ll be frittered away.
But the one who “loses his life for my sake”
—what’s that mean?
That means who willingly bears the burdens of others
out of love.
He’ll find his life. He’ll find his life.
That’s a formula, everybody.
Love Jesus more than you love your own parents,
children, and life, and then do what Jesus did,
bear people’s burdens,
and you’ll actually find your life.
Okay, one more step.
We’re not letting up on the demand here.
Listen to him:
“Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”
I think in many ways that’s the whole Gospel.
That’s the whole spiritual life in a nutshell.
When we love Jesus above all, we love him
more than we love our own children,
when we do what he did,
we bear other people’s burdens,
we take up the cross every day,
when we do that, we become the most
effective ambassadors possible for Christ.
How are people drawn into this dynamic?
Well, in his own day, there he was drawing
them into it, but now, now he uses
people like us.
I mean, we’re unworthy vessels,
God knows, but he uses us.
Again, “Whoever receives you receives me.”
So if someone sees you bearing the burdens
of another,
taking up your cross willingly,
loving Jesus above your own life
and your own children and parents?
Well, he’ll receive Christ through you,
and in receiving Christ, he’ll receive also
the one who sent Christ, namely the Father.
How do you propagate the faith?
With words?
Yes, I believe in that,
as I’ve done a lot of that in my life.
But above all, you propagate Christ
by being Christ,
by being conformed to him,
loving him above everything in the world.
And you become thereby an icon of Christ,
an ambassador of Christ,
and you draw people into the divine love.
The Father sent the Son.
The Son sends us.
And when people see us as an image of the Son,
they are drawn back to the Son and therefore
to the Father.
There it is, Matthew chapter 10.
You want the whole spiritual life
in all of its relentless demand and liberating power?
There’s where you’ll find it.
Unless you love me more than your mother,
your father, your son, your daughter,
your very life, you’re not worthy of me.
As far as I’m concerned, everything else in Christianity
is a footnote to that.
And God bless you.