\u201cJustin, your homily is too tough, too heavy, and too long, even for a homily about carrying our crosses.\u201d My wife, Julie, gave me this message the other night after I read her the homily I was planning on giving today. I\u2019ve been trying to pay a little bit more attention to my wife and her feelings about things lately, so today, you get a different homily; a kinder, gentler, and shorter homily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you catch that part of today\u2019s Gospel reading about our family? This was where Jesus talks about loving our families less. Jesus said we need to love him more than our parents and our children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of us may hear this and have a knee-jerk reaction saying, \u201cI don\u2019t like this teaching, so I\u2019m not going to follow it.\u201d Some of us mistakenly think Jesus is anti-family, but that\u2019s not the case at all. Let\u2019s take a look at what Jesus is saying here. Loving Jesus more doesn\u2019t result in our family getting less love, it actually results in them getting more love. Let me explain, if we love our families more than Jesus, we end up just loving our families with our own limited, human, selfish kind of love. This is a selfish love that would have resulted in me giving a homily I want people to hear instead of giving the homily Jesus actually wants his people to hear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what this selfish love looks like in action: A husband sits comfortably in his first-class seat on the plane while his wife is squashed back in her seat in coach; hypothetically speaking, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of us may have fallen into the trap in our own relationships of just using our selfish, limited, human love. We love with this human, selfish, limited love when we let the dollar amount someone spent on a present for us limit how much we spend on a present for them. We also love in this selfish, limited way when we are the child who spends a limited amount of quality time with our parents because our parents didn\u2019t spend more quality time with us when we were younger. We see this same limited human love with the spouse who is always keeping score of how many good deeds each party in the marriage has done and refuses to do an act of service until their spouse has done another act of service first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also see the limitation of this human love when family members become estranged from one another for something petty that they feel was an unforgivable transgression committed by the other. You get the point. This human, limited, selfish love is doing our families a great disservice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we love our families with a selfish love like this, I imagine Jesus looks at us and rolls his eyes, saying to us, \u201cplease get over yourselves.\u201d St. Paul puts it this way in today\u2019s second reading, \u201cIf then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.\u201d This dying with Christ might sound sad, but trust me, no one is going to mourn the death of the selfish guy sitting in first class; especially not his wife sitting back in coach. The ego has got to go. We need to lose our lives without losing our souls. The \u201cI\u201d has got to die for us to live and love the way God created us to live and love. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once we die completely to our selfish, limited, human way of loving, then the love of Jesus dwells within us and we love our family with Jesus\u2019 unselfish, unconditional, and life-giving love. With this divine love flowing through us, we are loving our families the way Jesus intended. Instead of loving our families on our own, we are loving our families with him in a way we could never have done on our own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this approach of loving, we see Jesus in each member of our family. This is the moment when we stop letting the way our family members have loved us be the limiting factor in the way we love them. Instead, we start letting the way Jesus has loved us to determine the way we love our families. Remember, our God is a God who is never outdone in his generosity. We are to live our lives as if they were a generosity contest, but when we live and love like this, each of us is required to make some sacrifices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Jesus picked up and carried the cross to his death for us, we too must pick up and carry our own crosses and follow after Jesus. Without the cross, there is no Christianity. Our identity as Christians is grounded in carrying our own crosses. Being a Christian then means we too have a part to play in the sufferings of Christ. Jesus makes room in his suffering for us because he knows that every loving relationship includes some form of suffering. He makes room for us then in his suffering so that each of us and each of our family members can know and experience what true love really is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moment when we enter into his suffering is when we move away from following Jesus just because of what he can do for us. Instead, we carry our crosses following Jesus out of a desire to give our lives to him so he can make his love for our families known to them through us. We carry our crosses every time we receive an unkind word from our families and respond in turn with kindness, love, and generosity. We carry our crosses every time we help members of our family carry their heavy crosses, even when they didn\u2019t help us carry our own heavy crosses. We carry our crosses in an infinite number of ways big and small. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we carry our crosses in a graceful way, we discover that there\u2019s no shortcut to holiness. We each must carry our crosses to experience the resurrection. Jesus knows that if we can make it through pain and suffering together, then we can live together forever, free from all pain and suffering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we love Jesus more than our family, this is how we tap into the self-sacrificial love he has for us so we can share his first-class love with our family. As we love Jesus more, we will experience life and a love with Jesus and our family that is kinder, gentler, and longer than we could ever imagine on our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle A \u2013 June 28, 2020<\/strong>
Mass Readings:<\/em>
Reading 1:\u00a0<\/em>2 KGS 4:8-11, 14-16A<\/a>
Psalm:<\/em>\u00a0PS 89:2-3, 16-17, 18-19<\/a>
Reading 2:\u00a0<\/em>ROM 6:3-4, 8-11<\/a>
Gospel:\u00a0<\/em>MT 10:37-42<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cJustin, your homily is too tough, too heavy, and too long, even for a homily about carrying our crosses.\u201d My wife, Julie, gave me this message the other night after I read her the homily I was planning on giving today. I\u2019ve been trying to pay a little bit more attention to my wife and … <\/p>\n

Read More “First-Class Love”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1030,"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions\/1030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/toledodeacon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}