If you want to know Jesus, you need to know that He wants to be your center.
Read chapter 14 of the gospel according to Saint Luke here.
Jesus is preparing a great banquet for us. He is preparing a place for us in Heaven, where every tear will be wiped away and our joy will be complete. Who would turn down such an invitation? Yet, one by one, the invited guests turn Jesus down, making other people or other things more important than Jesus. Yet the wedding feast will not be empty, as the servants of the Lord will invite others to the banquet.
Jesus goes on, speaking even more directly: “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. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” What does this mean? We know Jesus is love and He commands us to love everyone – to will their good – as He loves us. Jesus is saying here that we need to place Him at the center of our lives. Our relationship with Him comes first – before our mother and father, before our wife and children, before our brothers and sisters, and before our own life. Our family relationships and our own life are important, but everything in our lives has to be subordinated to Jesus, who is the highest good and gives our life its meaning. That also means renouncing our possessions. Our stations in life may require us to have possessions – a husband and wife need a home for their children – but we have possessions to serve the Lord. The possessions should not possess us.
We also carry our own cross. Jesus took up the cross literally (and willingly) to save us from sin and death. All of us will bear metaphorical crosses of suffering and grief in this life. This is an inescapable fact, whatever you believe about God. To those without faith, these sufferings have no meaning, and should therefore be avoided at all costs. Yet these sufferings cannot be avoided, and the unbeliever must ultimately succumb to despair. To the Christian, our sufferings bring us closer to our Lord Jesus, who willingly underwent the most brutal suffering to save us. Our suffering, united with His, becomes redemptive. The body suffers, but the soul is restored. When we unite our suffering with His, and offer it up for the salvation of the world, we play our own small part in His saving work. Praise be to God, that He allows us to share in His saving work!
You might ask, is this reasonable? Isn’t He being too demanding? Is it fair for Him to insist on being the center of our lives? Why does following Him have to be an all or nothing choice? To answer these questions, we need to recollect who Jesus is. He is our Creator. As Saint John tells us in the prologue to his gospel, “All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be” (John 1:3). Looking down at our sinfulness and misery, He did not abandon us; He humbled Himself to become a person and take upon Himself all of our sufferings, and the enormous weight of our sins, in order to redeem us. Saint Paul writes:
Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Phillipians 2:5-8)
How could we not make Him the center of our lives? How could we treat Him as merely a great teacher, who we will follow when it’s convenient for us and ignore when it’s difficult? How can any response to Him other than to know Him, love Him, and serve Him completely be adequate? Saint Paul says it best when he sums up what must follow from the life and death of Jesus:
Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phillipians 2:9-11)
It’s not always easy to make Jesus the center of our lives. All sorts of worldly attachments clamor for our attention. Let’s remember who Jesus is – and who we are without Him – and pray to walk with Him more closely every day, placing Him at the center of our being. He wants to repose in our hearts. Let’s make space for Him there.
“There is a difference between renouncing all things and leaving all things. For it is the way of few perfect men to leave all things, that is, to cast behind them the cares of the world, but is the part of all the faithful to renounce all things, that is, so to hold the things of this world as by them not to be held in the world.” -Saint Bede the Venerable
Image: The Last Supper by Fritz von Uhde (downloaded from Wikipedia Commons).
Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every day for the salvation of souls.
