The family business

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19:27-29) recounts a brief exchange between Jesus, Peter, and the other apostles. We who have left everything: what do we get? is St Peter’s rather desperate question, which has the tone of a man who has let his enthusiasm get ahead of his mastery of the terms and conditions of a contract. Jesus’ reply, however, is generous beyond expectations. The apostles, He says, will judge the tribes of Israel, receive a hundredfold in this life, and inherit eternal life.

We must not think any the less of Peter for this question. In this chapter of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus had just stood the disciples’ sensibilities on their heads by saying how hard it would be for the wealthy to be saved. We must place the exchange in today’s gospel in this specific context: how can we make sense of things when Jesus has challenged the very way in which we understand things? In the Old Testament, material blessings were often associated with God’s blessings. There is a hangover of this notion in the prosperity gospel and certain versions of the doctrine of predestination. If material benefits are the sign of God’s blessings, what does it mean to be poor and homeless, like the Son of Man, especially for us who are such earth-bound creatures of flesh, blood, and bone?

In this sense, today’s gospel thrills with the implications of incarnation, of the taking of flesh by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity who enters history and, in so doing, begins to carve out from the rocks of the passing ages a pathway back to the Father for His lost children. There is a paradox behind the incarnation. Our hearts are made for thee, O God, and are restless until they rest in thee, says St Augustine. Nevertheless, the way in which we must ascend to such a place of rest is proportioned to our weakness by our loving God who made us such as we are, material creatures. We are not meant to be angels. Indeed, those who would aspire to be angels often end up as beasts, as the old saying goes.

Had we not fallen, there would be no dilemma here, but since we are fallen, we encounter the dilemma throughout our lives: on the one hand, we must deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Jesus, and, on the other, this path of denial is not an abandonment of what we are as material creatures. God made matter; it is not the work of the devil. There is in other words a theology not only of the body but of the material world, and of our fleshly hearts that need evangelisation like our weary souls, and here we can speak of incarnation in a broader sense: the way in which the grace of the incarnation of the Son of God takes flesh in our human reality of spirit and matter. This incarnation in a secondary sense involves a certain physicality, made concrete in the matter of the seven sacraments, but it also evokes the following of Christ, the being like Him who is the icon of the children of God, and in whose image we are remade. May everyone we meet encounter in us the Word made flesh in Mary, as we so often pray, not as a mere historical accident but as a condition of our discipleship.

Of course, in COLW the words of the gospel today – in which Jesus alludes to those who have left brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children or lands for His sake - are met in their truest and fullest sense in the lives of our sisters. Nevertheless, there is another sense in which they may be true for the rest of us, and in which we again encounter the dilemma I spoke of above.

For on the one hand, we need brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, and lands to live in. These features of our existence are not mere social arrangements or physical conditions of our lives, nor indeed do they only impose on us a series of duties that we ought to perform; more than all these things, their roots plunge down into our very identities, they shape where we have come from and how we receive the world around us. Our relationship with our fathers and mothers in the natural order will shape our ability to encompass fatherhood and motherhood in a spiritual sense.

But on the other hand, Jesus’ invitation to leave fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, etc asks us not so much to abandon these relationships as to transform their reality through His love. It asks us more particularly not to break our bonds harshly but to put our loves – love of God and love of family - into a right order. What is important here is that even those of us who do not physically leave our families behind, as do our sisters, are still called to bring our closest relationships into harmony with the following of Christ. Our families too have the same call, though they may not recognise it.

We find in this perhaps some clue as to the generosity of Jesus’ reward to his disciples. Loving God and loving our families in God may cost us things that run right to the roots of who we are. There is a fear in Peter’s original question, a fear that might lurk in all our minds when we face the radical nature of this call to love that we all are given. In this sense, we might listen again to today’s gospel and hear in it an echo of those tender words found in the gospel of Luke: Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.