The life of anyone seeking to be a follower of Jesus, to be loyal to the tenets of the Catholic Church will be a life forced to confront serious challenges. These challenges will, at times, bring division even with a disciple’s relationships with loved ones and friends.
The gospel reading for today’s liturgy, a part of Luke’s twelfth chapter, offers a picture of a Jesus not usually thought of by most Catholics today. The words are so strong, so direct, so unforgiving, that many chose to forget them. The parts of Jeremiah’s prophecy and Paul’s letter to the Romans remind us that the Jesus-mission is not an easy vocation. Following Jesus and what he and the Church he established teaches us can bring rejection, can bring ridicule, can bring isolation. At times, being the loyal disciple will put us in a deep well with Jeremiah. In the extreme, dedication to the mission of Jesus Christ can bring a confrontation with death itself.
The theme or message of these readings is a reminder to us that association with the mission of Jesus and subsequently his Church is not a commitment without cost — at times the personal sacrifice of our free will. A genuine disciple is a man or a woman who accepts and endeavors every day to life the life of the gospels. What Jesus preaches is how to be faithful to God’s will for every person. What the Church teaches is how we can be faithful to God’s will in our own times.
To fully comprehend the extent or depth of this theme we must consider honestly all that separates us from living out our lives as God would have us live them. We have to give serious attention to the Ten Commandments and the teachings of our Church. To believe that coming to a celebration of the liturgy once a week, relying on what we learned or think we learned years ago is, quite frankly, to fool oneself. The life of a Christian and a Roman Catholic demands an understanding of how our tenets of faith guide us in a contemporary world.
Consider the divisions Jesus mentions in today’s gospel. Divisions even within families are realities he foresees.
And do these divisions exist today? Surely they do. If you have any doubts about that, consider these issues: (1) the family squabbles each weekend as young people struggle to being independent of the parents who brought them into the world but of the Church into which they were baptized and raised. How many family contests or defeats are there each Sunday morning? How painful is it for some parents who see their children abandon religious practices? How painful is the division created by the Church’s mission to teach what Jesus taught about the sanctity of life? About the sanctity of the Sacrament of Marriage? About the practice of celibacy for those not married?
Today’s world surrounds the true follower of Jesus with issues that easily put the believer deep in a well with Jeremiah. But we must believe — taught by the example of Jesus himself and the many witnesses in our Church’s history — that we cannot only survive in being true Jesus-followers but can enjoy success if we honestly believe that God will come to our aid as promised in the 40th psalm in today’s liturgy. "The Lord heard my cry. He drew me out of a pit of destruction, out of the mud of the swamp; he set my feet upon a crag (definition: a steeply projecting mass of rock forming part of a rugged cliff or headland); he made firm my steps."
