Monday, Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
It may unsettle us to hear Jesus say that he hasn’t come to bring peace to the earth but a sword. The ‘sword’ seems like an echo of the cruel way the Egyptian Pharaoh treated the people of Israel in today’s first reading. Yet, the language of Jesus is often that of imagery and metaphor and is not to be taken literally. The ‘sword’ Jesus refers to is not a literal sword. In Luke’s gospel, Simeon says to Mary a ‘sword will pierce your own soul too’. Her calling to be the mother of God’s Son would entail many a difficult struggle. The rejection of her son by so many would impact painfully on her. Likewise, Jesus declares to his disciples that their loyalty to him will sometimes have painful consequences for themselves. They may even find themselves at odds with members of their own family. Jesus calls for a loyalty and commitment to himself that is even stronger than what is normally owed to family members. As Emmanuel, God-with-us, he alone is to be loved with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul and all our strength. This is the same quality of love with which the Lord loved and continues to love each one of us. We can each say with Saint Paul, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’. The Lord has given us his whole self in love. He emptied himself to fill us with the life of God. He made himself poor so that we might be enriched with all God’s blessings. The loving loyalty and commitment that Jesus calls for in today’s gospel reading is always a response to the Lord’s unconditional love for us. As Saint John says in his first letter, ‘We love because he first loved us’. Jesus promises in our gospel reading that when we give ourselves away in love to himself, as he has given himself away in love to us, we will find our lives, we will become the fully alive human being God created us to be.