A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus was addressing the crowds, great multitude of people. When his mother and his brothers appeared outside, and they wanted to speak with him. Someone said to Jesus, your mother and your brothers are outside standing, and they wanna talk to you. And Jesus said to the one who had told him this, who is my mother?
Who are my brothers? Then, extending extending his hands to his disciples, he said, there are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my heavenly father is brother and sister and mother to me. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Every time I read this particular passage from Saint Matthew or hear it referred to usually with a certain amount of bitterness, I think of Saint Peter Claver, if my very fallacious memory serves me rightly. But anyway, when he decided to become a Jesuit and left home, lived over there near Barcelona, and he was a second generation Jesuit, he never even wrote home again, never even dropped a note to his parents or his family. And I have heard and read severe criticisms of that attitude because I've heard of other instances of this. And the argument is that we are bound with natural ties to our family, And therefore, it is no virtue to cut yourself off from those natural ties. Of course, I could give you a number of instances of the same thing, which caused scandal, but which have changed since Vatican two.
But we don't have to. I've given you the picture. Now, this sounds like a plausible argument, and undoubtedly there's a lot of worth in it. Remember, there is no argument that's totally worthless. None.
None at all. So the fact that you can say something has some truth in it is is self evident proposition. But the point is this, and this is not a need see, we always I guess you're getting tired of my saying this, but you keep coming back to Jesus Christ and you find the cross. You don't find a bed of roses. So here's another instance of it.
Remember, our blessed Lord said, unless you unless you leave father and mother and home and sister and brother and all the rest of it, you cannot be my disciple. Christ said that. And just go back and read. And after all, no one knows more than you do if you read the the four gospels. It's all we have.
When Christ chose his his first 12, he says, come follow me. And we're told they left everything to follow Jesus. Peter left his father. Now, today in this country, that's being done all the time. People leave their fathers and mothers and go leave their husbands and their wives and their children.
We do this. This is this is commonplace, know. Commonplace. It's a scandal of The United States that so many divorced fathers who have responsibilities in law to their children can't be even found to support their own flesh and blood. But you have to look at this not through the eyes of USA 1984, you have to look at it through the eyes of a Jewish culture.
And to think of a son abandoning his father was absolutely unthinkable. Unthinkable. Let me give you a very contemporaneous illustration of this. When I was over in Jerusalem, I had the pleasure and privilege of spending almost all my time with brother Roger, a Franciscan brother, who had been over there for I don't know how many years. A youngish man, but he'd been there something like fifteen or twenty years.
He knew his way around. When we went down to Tel Aviv, the people in the stores recognized him. He knew. And I remember we had mass one day. There was an Arabic parish attached to their church in Jerusalem, and there was a good congregation of Arabs.
So I asked him, I said, Do you get many vocations from this group? He said, Practically none. Well, of course, that's what we're getting in this country. But I was rather amazed at that. And I asked him, do you know why?
He said, sure I know why. He says, it's very simple. He said, an Arab father or mother or even and of course their children, they cannot accept the vow of poverty. Which means you, according to the way they think of it, that you renounce all property, and that a son becoming a Franciscan, having no property, would not be able to support his family in their old age, ergo, no vocations. He said, As you know, and he says, As I know, he says, If a young man comes to us to become a Franciscan, their families will not be abandoned by the Franciscan order.
But he said, we can't tell them that. If we told them that, we'd have an army of priests over here. So you have to look at this through the eyes of the culture of our blessed Lord. When he said explicitly, unless you're prepared to leave everything and let me tell you something, he went even farther than that. Because he said, unless you're prepared to renounce even your own very self, you cannot be my disciple.
Now there's absolutely no debate about Jesus having said that. He said this as clearly and as explicitly and even more dramatically than I'm saying it, unequivocally. All Jesus asked was everything that you have to give, including yourself. And he says, if you if you lose yourself for my sake, you will find yourself. In other words, Christ doesn't call us to be natural men and women.
He's calling us to be his followers, which means, as we use the word, a supernatural calling. A supernatural life, a supernatural existence, which begins with your baptism. Baptism is not an initiatory rite. It galls me every time I see it. You think it were a bunch of Masons or a bunch of KSC or the Rotarians or the Phi Beta Kappa or something.
A baptism is a transformation. It's a complete metamorphosis. Do you know what that means? It means the tadpole becoming the frog. And every elementary biology student knows that, what we mean by complete metamorphosis.
That's what happens with baptism. We're not just introduced to a society or to a community and all that kind of stuff, which of course is all very true. But we are transformed from being merely natural beings. We are changed, unbelievably, miraculously, incredibly changed into a whole new existence if we are followers of Jesus Christ. And he doesn't play according to the rules of the natural law.
He doesn't reject the natural law. Our blessed Lord never rejected the natural law. But he called us to something higher. Higher, infinitely higher, beyond our imagining. You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood.
So when a man like Saint Peter Claver takes Christ literally, come follow me, and he does that. He cuts himself off completely from his family, had never never had anything more to do with I'm not approving that. I'm not disapproving it. I'm only saying if you disapprove it, you are arguing not with Peter Klabber but with Jesus Christ. Come right back to today's reading.
This a lot of people resent this. They'll say, you see, I I've I've said many times, you cannot say Christ was only exclusively a good man. A good man, if that's all, couldn't say these things and be called good. But did Christ say these things? He certainly did, and he emphasized it.
And he and it's on more than one occasion. If we can't get out of this, we may squirm and we may wiggle and we may object, and that's human. That is human. And let us not forget, we are human. It is uncomfortable to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
It doesn't give you this tranquility, this peace that the world and that we seem to be so keen about. Christ never promised that at all. Never. So let's not waste our time fooling around thinking that that's what we're going to get. We're not.
All we're going to get is what Jesus promised us, at best. And he promised us that if we give him everything. Everything. This is tremendous. We don't think about it enough.
But that's what Jesus he asked us to to give up family, mother, father, husband, wife, children, home, even our very selves for his sake. For his sake. Not to give it up. Plenty of people have given it up. But the point is for his sake.
We associate ourselves with Jesus Christ. Why? Why do we do it? Because we're convinced that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, the son of a virgin girl. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.