God Is #1

On this Labor Day weekend, I have some family visiting from out of town. My sister and her husband and their three kids live in Nebraska, which means that they make it to Arkansas only about once a year. The rest of our immediate family – my parents, myself, and my younger brother Fr. Stephen Hart – all live here in Arkansas, so we really value the opportunities we have to see them, since they are relatively few and far between. And as some of you know from your own lives, visiting with nieces and nephews has a special importance when you don’t have children of your own – you get a chance to see the world in a different way, and have a glimpse into the future of your own family and your heritage. Plus, they’re just a lot of fun to be around.

All of that is to say – I love my family very much, and I’m sure you love yours, too. How challenging it is then for all of us to hear in today’s Gospel that to be Jesus’s disciple, we have to hate our families: our mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, sisters and brothers – yes, even presumably, our nieces and nephews. I think we all know that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, isn’t saying here that we have to literally *hate* them – as in, feel dislike or harbor animosity toward them. Perhaps it’s important to be clear about that, at a time when a lot of family life and relationships are disrupted by hatred, distrust, disagreements, and resentments. The Church has always privileged the life of the family and promoted its unity and harmony, not just as the building block of society but as a microcosm of the family of faith, the Church, with Christ at the Head and we as members of his Body. God wants us to love our families, because he has given them to us as his gift – and given us to them as his gift – and as means of coming to know and love him more deeply. We always take our example of how to do this from the Holy Family, the life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Nazareth.

What Jesus is really saying here is that our love for him must exceed every other love, and that includes the love that is perhaps most natural, most deeply held – the love of our families. If asked, most of us would probably agree that the love of God should come before all else. In fact, sometimes I hear people say, in a list of their priorities, “God is #1, my family is #2, and then every other priority is a distant 3rd.” But while we might agree that’s the proper ordering, we often don’t really live up to that in practice. In fact, I think Jesus refers here to our families because he knows that when it comes to those relationships, the ones that are most important to us, we sometimes can let our values and principles slide a little bit.

For example, how many of us have ever gotten out of a work or school obligation because of a family emergency? Or looked the other way with language or behavior we didn’t approve of because it came from a family member? I’m not saying those things are always wrong to do; perhaps they may even be the right thing, in a given situation. But right or wrong, our family relationships sometimes have a certain, special hold over us that other things don’t. What Jesus is pointing out to us today is that that may be okay when it comes to other things, but not when it comes to him. To put our relationship with God second to that of our family *is* wrong, and we might do this in practice more than we like to admit.

For example, we put our families ahead of the love of God if we think that, because we are going out of town for the weekend or going away on vacation, then it’s okay to not go to Sunday Mass since we are away from our regular parish. We put our families ahead of the love of God if we find it very important to get our kids to sports practice or to their favorite activity but not as important to take them to Confirmation class or to the parish youth group meetings. We put our families ahead of the love of God if we find it more important that our family members share our political viewpoints, or our favorite hobbies, or our sports allegiances, than we do our Catholic faith.

Now, I imagine that most of us might say at this point, “Okay, okay — maybe there are some times when I place the love of my family before the love of God. Is that so bad? After all, it’s my *family*!” And I think here we have to say, “Yes, it is.” I’m sorry, I know it may be hard to hear, but Jesus really is saying we have to love him even ahead of our families. In fact, I think we have to say that Jesus is telling us that unless we love God first, and unless we teach our families to love God above all else, then we really aren’t loving our families, because we are not forming them in the most important way – in the only thing that really matters: to know, love, and serve him.

James Smetham, Christ Preaching to the Multitudes (c. 1890)

To be sure, family relationships aren’t always easy, and even if we try to make sure our love for family is rooted in the love of God, it’s not always easy to know what to do in difficult situations. For example, sometimes people ask me things like: “Father, my daughter has decided to leave the Church; what should I do?” or “My nephew is getting married, but not in the Catholic Church; should I go to the wedding?” Those kinds of questions are often hard to answer, because a lot depends on the particulars of the relationship. Most of the time, the person knows what is best or what they are being called to do. Generally, I tend to favor the approach of trying to preserve the relationship, while also explaining what we believe or what our Catholic faith teaches. But it’s not always easy, and we should wrestle with these situations. We should really ask ourselves, “What does my relationship with God and with my faith ask of me in this particular situation?”

There’s one last thing that Jesus says we shouldn’t prefer to love of him, and that’s our very own life. The possibility of martyrdom is not something that keeps most of us up at nights. We know that it’s still possible in places in the world for people to die for the name of Jesus, but that’s a possibility that feels pretty remote for most of us. But there are lesser forms of martyrdom that perhaps we face more frequently: whether we will compromise our beliefs to preserve a friendship or to keep up appearances or to win the esteem of those we want to think well of us. Putting Jesus first can often mean putting ourselves last, sometimes in the very ways we find it most hard to do.

Friends, I know this has probably been a challenging homily; I found it a challenging one myself! But sometimes to love well we need to be challenged – whether that’s loving ourselves, our families, and especially God above all. It’s only in this way that we advance toward the future and the heritage that God has created for us. But in those difficult things the Lord asks us to do, let’s also remember that he will give us strength, perseverance, and even peace of heart, if we seek his will above all. He comes to us now, in this Eucharist, to renew the relationship that we have with him – individually and collectively – so that in all we do, we might seek to love him above all.