13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 28, 2020 - 2 Kings 4: 8-11, 14-16a; Romans 6: 3-4, 8-11; Matthew 10: 37-42
 
This bag weighs a ton. Worst day ever. My parents will kill me. I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse. I’m drowning in tears.
 
Those are common things we hear all the time, but they’re exaggerations. There’s a Greek word for them. It’s called hyperbole (two Greek words – hupér, meaning above and beyond, and bolus, the target or the goal), so it’s an overreaching.
 
How ‘bout this? I’ve told you a thousand times to stop exaggerating.  That’s hyperbole about hyperbole.
 
There’s also another Greek word that we need to know for today’s Gospel, and that’s anachronism (from two Greek words - ana and khronos - beyond or before the time). From khronos you get English words like chronicle. I tell you that because Jesus, very frequently in His conversations and His teaching, used both hyperbole and anachronism. And there’s an anachronism in today’s Gospel that you really need to notice.
 
In order to talk about today’s Gospel, we have to ask ourselves three questions. What was happening on the occasion when Jesus spoke these words? Secondly, why did St. Matthew decide to tell this story, in this way, to his people, close to forty years after the life and death and resurrection of Jesus? And thirdly, what is the takeaway for us twenty centuries later?
 
So, this is part of the story of Jesus sending out the Apostles as advance men, to soften the crowds up for when He came. And they are given a commission to preach the same way Jesus has preached up to that point, and to heal the sick. A lot of authority. A lot of power. But in this passage Jesus warns them that with that authority and power will come animosity. Not everybody is going to be happy to see you. Not everybody is going to listen to you. Some people will reject you, just as they have rejected Me up to this point. You’re going to have a hard time of it. But the anachronism in His teaching is this – “No one who does not take up his cross and follow after Me can be my disciple.” Jesus could not have said “… you should take up your cross …”, because He wasn’t crucified yet. The word would have been meaningless to His audience.
 
Now some commentators say, “Well all Jewish people knew about crucifixion; there were decaying bodies hanging on crosses all along the paved roads built by the Roman occupying armies. But whether that’s true or not, the whole idea of crucifixion was so abhorrent to Jewish people, there was even a saying in the scripture, “Cursed is he who hangs upon the tree.” But they never would have used that image or that idiom in conversation, ever.
 
So this is an anachronism … which tells us what’s going on at the time St. Matthew is writing for his people. It is now approximately fifteen to twenty years since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. The center of Jewish people’s worship and public life is gone. Up until that time, people who followed Christ, and who were Jewish by birth, believed themselves still to be Jews. And although there was controversy between them and the leaders of Judaism, they were not barred from the temple in Jerusalem. And so the loss of the city of Jerusalem was a catastrophic event, not only for Jews, but for many, many Christians.
 
At the same time, it was the experience of two-and-a-half to three generations of Christians that, if they identified themselves as followers of the Nazarene, they were frequently cut off from the rest of their Jewish relatives. “You are dead to me, if you follow Jesus.”
 
And so there was great heartache involved in becoming a Christian by the time St. Matthew is writing. And it’s clear that it’s also dangerous to be a Christian. It is possible that you could be crucified, or thrown to the lions, or beheaded, or some other dreadful end like that.  So he’s talking to people who are disillusioned, grief-stricken, and afraid.
 
Now, how do we bring this forward into our own day?
 
Priests will tell you that, in their ministry, they have encountered family situations where somebody has refused to go to a son or daughter’s wedding because they were marrying someone of another race or different religion, or something else like that. There was actually a time when Catholic priest counseled people not to go. But that’s an abhorrent corruption of what we believe as Christians. We believe that the first rule is a rule of charity. That if we truly love somebody, we stand by them even if we don’t necessarily approve of their lifestyle or their choices. We stand by them as much and as strongly as we can.
 
When I announced my intentions to enter the seminary, not everyone in my family was pleased. My Italian grandmother actually wept. Begged my father to try and stop me. I’m sure he was in sympathy with her because he made an open secret of the fact that he didn’t like the fact that his only son was becoming a priest. It took several years of my ministry before he not only reconciled himself to my vocation, but began to champion it among others. But there’s distancing there.
 
So, the first part of Jesus’ message for us today. I asked you at the beginning, do you think Jesus means it? “Whoever does not hate father or mother (there’s an exaggeration), hate son or daughter…” Of course not. What it’s saying is that Jesus needs to be in the center of our lives, not on the periphery of our lives. We’ll talk more about that in just a moment.
 
The other thing is that, we as Catholic Christians, have things that we hold sacred, things that we hold dear. Some of those things, now and then, are challenged, and every now and then, what we hold dear and what we believe should dictate the way we think and the way we act in public life. And that can make us unpopular among our friends and neighbors, among the public in general. But that’s when we are called upon to put Jesus in the center of our lives. I’m going to suggest a way to do that.
 
There are (cue the hyperbole) millions of ways to do it. But here’s one of them. St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote a book of spiritual exercises for the men that he would recruit for his order. One of the things he said was that when you read a passage from scripture, try to do what he called “composition of place.” That’s an old-fashioned word. What he meant was, put yourself in the picture. Anyone can do this anytime they want to. Pick out a favorite Gospel story of yours, or, if you’re not sure what your favorite is, go online and just find one. And then imagine yourself in the story. Are you there in the crowd? Are you one of Jesus’ followers? Are you one of His hecklers? Do you know Him personally, or is this the first time you’re ever seeing Him? What’s your reaction to Him? How do you feel about Him?
 
The reason I say that is because, for the last thirty-five or forty years, the Church has been putting a great deal of effort into trying to get every Catholic to get their ducks in a row. We have focused almost exclusively on doctrine and discipline, to the detriment of something else. Our friends in the fundamentalist churches talk about “accepting Jesus as our Personal Savior.” And we shy away from that expression because it casts a shadow over our understanding of the legitimacy of our sacraments and how they give grace. But at some level that’s true, that everybody who claims to believe in Jesus needs to accept Jesus as their Personal Savior, have to see Him as a real human being, and create a real relationship with Him. And that’s not hyperbole.