Fr Billy Swan
Dear friends. Imagine a wheel of a car or a bicycle. For the wheel to turn properly and smoothly, the axel must be centered exactly right. If it isn’t then the wheel won’t turn as it should.
The life of everyone is like a wheel. It must have a center to turn on. What or who is that center for you and me? If it isn’t Christ and his kingdom then everything else will be off kilter. This is the message of the Gospel today where Jesus asks us to make him the center of our lives.
There are some teachings of Jesus that are truly shocking and today’s Gospel is one of them. Think for a second of the person you love most in your life, the person you live for. It could be your husband or wife or your father, your mother, son or daughter. Jesus tells us that to be a true disciple of him, we must displace these people from the center of our lives and replace them with him. Seriously? Yes, that is what he is asking, no less. There is no watering his demand down: 'Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me'. The only conclusion we can make is that he is a mad egotist or that he is who he says he is as God.
To understand this challenging teaching we must go back to the Ten Commandments given by God in the Old Testament. The first of these commandments concerns right worship or praise. It asks us to have God at the center of the wheel and to worship Him alone. The rest of the commandments that follow are implications of this – that we love everyone else and everything else in his name. In other words, our relationship with God is not meant to be one thing among many but the axel around which everything else turns.
It is timely for us to be reminded of this fundamental religious principle today. We have many interests and many demands on our time and indeed on our hearts. We also have many loves. We also know that despite us living in an age that prizes equality, all of our loves don’t exist on the same level. We love our spouse more than we love our friends, we love our parents more than we love our neighbours, we love our children more than anything. Therefore, love, by its very nature, has a hierarchy. The key point of today’s Gospel is that we must love Christ and his kingdom first. God cannot be one interest among many because if that is the case, then God will eventually be replaced with something else.
This translates to our busy lives. We have sports, drama, gymnastics, commitments, holidays and so forth. And then there is Mass on Sundays. The Eucharist, at best, can sometimes be understood as one activity among many. But unless it comes first and is prioritized in our lives, then it will soon disappear from our lives. That’s how it goes.
Does this mean that we love everything and everyone less? Certainly not. On contrary. For if we love God first then we will be free to love everything and everyone in his name. Our children, despite us loving them beyond words, are not our ultimate end; God is. If we idolize them or our spouse or lover, or sport or politics or passions, then we will break them, and they will break us. They are gifts from God but not God. So, let’s not put divine expectations on human shoulders.
Friends, as part of every NCT, a car is checked for wheel balance and the health of the axel. This Sunday’s Gospel is like a spiritual NCT that asks us who is at the center of our lives. W.B. Yeats once wrote that ‘the center cannot hold’ (The Second Coming). I think that many of our woes today can be explained by the fact that we don’t have a center or because the ego, or another false god has replaced God at the center. Look at he word 'PRIDE'. There are two letters on either side with 'i' at the center. This is how things go wrong - when 'I' and my ego are the the center or when I am 'self-centered'. Either way, Yeats is right – the center cannot hold. It’s time to re-center on God, give Him his proper place and to love everything and everyone is his name.