PaddlingPadre

This saying of our Lord, that whoever loves father or mother or son or daughter more than Him is not worthy of Him, is typically counted among the hard sayings of Jesus, and we can well understand why. There seems to be in these words a repudiation of the natural order of things, for what love is more natural or more enduring, all else being equal, than that between a parent and a child? Such love is hardwired into us. Hardly needing to be taught, it flows from who we are in our relationship with one another.

But if a parent ought to love their child because the child is theirs, and if a child naturally loves its mother and its father because they have given him life, because he is, in a sense, the fruit of their mutual love, then how much more ought we to love God, who is our Father in a more absolute sense than even our earthly fathers? For while it’s true that the material stuff of which we are made is provided by our parents, the soul which in-forms the body is created immediately by God. And so, while you could truly say that a child, at least when all is rightly ordered, is loved into existence by his or her parents, the child is even more profoundly loved into existence by God, who out of love creates that child’s soul and calls him or her to return to God, through Christ, to enjoy eternal beatitude. And then, even on the material level, is not the stuff of which we are made, our flesh and our bones, are not even these ultimately the creation of God?

And so, if it is natural for us to love our parents, it is even more natural that we should love God, for it is God, even more than our parents, who has, in love, given us the gift of life, and it is God who likewise gives life to our children.

Now admittedly, this fact is less obvious to us than is the fact of our biological parentage, and so we do not necessarily feel, at least at the beginning, the absolute primacy that the love of God must have in our hearts over every other sort of love, over every other possible object. We can see, after all, our parents and our children visibly, but it takes the work of prayer and reflection in order for us to raise our minds to the contemplation of God, who as the transcendent cause of that we see is not in himself visible. And that is why, I think, Jesus uses such dramatic language here. He is trying to break us out of a kind of idolatry that can seem so high and so noble that we fail to recognize it for what it is.

Because sin is not, as we might naively think, the love of what is evil. For evil, when it comes to it, will always be revealed to be nothing, and one cannot love what does not exist. Rather, evil is something negative – it is the lack of the good that ought to be present, and so to sin is not to choose what is evil in an absolute sense, but is rather to choose a good that is lacking in some way, that has become twisted and misshapen. Adultery, for example, is not evil because of the sexual act, for that exists within marriage and is something good, but rather adultery is evil because with adultery the good that ought to be there, the good that ought to accompany the act, namely the marriage relationship, is absent.

And so too with every other sin. When we sin, it is not that we love something that is evil in itself, for everything that exists, as we read in the Book of Wisdom, is good: For he fashioned all thing that they might have being, and the creatures of the world are wholesome; there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of Hades on earth, for righteousness is undying. Instead, when we sin, we love in a disordered way. We love certain things more than we should, or we neglect to love what we ought to love. And there is nothing that we ought to love more than God. For, as we’ve already said, it is God who created us, who loved us into being, and it is God who has called us to himself, such that our eternal happiness consists in the vision of God to which the Christian life leads us.

And so truly, whoever loves father or mother or son or daughter more than God is not worthy of Him, for such a one has ceded the first place in their heart to that which is unworthy of such love. And that kind of twisted love, as in every other kind of idolatry, will, if persisted in, lead one to misery and despair, because if you love some created thing, whatever it might be, above God, then you will end up seeking from that thing what only God can provide. Because your heart was made for God alone, and in any other object, however relatively lotfty it might be, your heart will only find restlessness and frustration; it will become infected by possessiveness, resentment, and jealousy, and will end in utter wretchedness.

Thus, when our Lord tells us that whoever loves father or mother or son or daughter more than him is not worthy in him, he is not telling us not to love, but is rather teaching us how to love truly. Indeed, you could say that whole the Christian journey is ultimately a training in love, that the Church is a school of love. For not only do we love most truly when we love most what we ought to love most, but in loving God above all, all of our other loves are able to reach their full flowering, each of them becoming whole and hale, free of deformity or distortion, each of them existing pure and untwisted in their proper proportion.

And so, not only ought we to love God above all else, above even our parents and children, but also, if we would truly love our parents or our children or our spouses or our friends, then we will love God above all else, for it is only when our love is thus properly ordered that we can truly love at all.