Sermon Tone Analysis

Discipleship & Renunciation

Today’s Gospel message is direct, sobering, and even a bit frightening.

“Everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions,” says Jesus, “cannot be my disciple.”

Today’s Gospel message is direct, sobering, and even a bit frightening.

“Everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions,” says Jesus, “cannot be my disciple.”

But his message is even more demanding than that.

The Gospel reading opens with Jesus having a great crowd following him and he turned to them and said: “If any one comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

What?

Separating yourself (that’s what “hating” means in this context) from parents, spouse, children, brothers and sisters, even from your very self as a precondition for following Christ?

That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Indeed it flies in the face of the loves and loyalties we are expected to have, the commitments we are expected to keep, the commitments we are bound to keep by virtue of promises made and our state in life.

And notice that Jesus is not speaking only to single men and women here—the unattached, as we sometimes call them—the ones who in our day might answer a call to priesthood or religious life; no, he is speaking to all of us, married and single alike.

But how are we to understand what he is saying?

How can we resist the temptation simply to brush these words aside, dismissing them out of hand as not applicable to us, and then just going about our usual business?

That’s not an option.

We have to be attentive to his words.

We meet him there in the Gospel; you cannot simply tell him this doesn’t apply to you.