This Gospel Is Scary

Father's Love

February 16. 1996
Sunday homily
St. Ambrose Cathedral
Des Moines, IA
USA

"In today's reading, Jesus says, 'Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his Cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life, for my sake, will find it.'

"This Gospel is scary, we have to admit it. Jesus tells us that we must deny ourselves, take up our cross and lose our life in order to find it. There's no way around this and Jesus doesn't try to sugarcoat it. But this is one of the truths of our Faith that must  be understood correctly or it is misused by the Enemy to scare us away from Jesus, from our Faith, from life.

"I think one of the most helpful distinctions in terms used here was made by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who died in 1968, in his book 'New Seeds of Contemplation.'  In it, Merton distinguishes between the True Self who is created and willed by God---always known, intended and loved by God---and the False Self which is created by fear, created by us when we don't believe we are loved by our Father in heaven. So, out of fear, we create an armor that will defend us and we attempt to make ourselves invulnerable to whatever comes. In that process, we harden our hearts so we don't love and we're constantly trying to build our own little kingdoms. A child without a parent does become hard, like a street urchin, who learns to be tough in order to survive.

"So, if we understand this distinction, this hard saying of Jesus becomes easier. If we perhaps hear Jesus saying here, 'If a person wishes to come after Me, he must deny his false self, take up his cross and follow me. Whoever would save his 'false' self, will lose it but whoever loses his 'false' self, for My sake, will find his 'true' self.'

"Even though this way of translating Jesus' words is a little cumbersome, it helps us understand that He is saying that our process of  annihilation is not of my True Self, which is created and nurtured by God. Over the centuries, a harmful strain of masochism and self-hatred has crept into Christianity. The Enemy tries to falsify every good thing and he has truly falsified this one. Many people are deep-down afraid that, if they give themselves totally to God, God will abuse them or take away their freedom.

"Now imagine that. The God who created us and redeemed us wants to destroy us. How can God contradict Himself? Many people have had abusive experiences with parents or others in their lives and live in an unhealed state. We all tend to project our 'unhealedness' on to others and so we project these past experiences onto our heavenly Father as well.  Obviously, we have to purify that notion and realize that we can't re-make God into our image and likeness.

"But we also have to purify a deeper tendency we have of not trusting God and not believing that He is truly in love with us. Jesus said in John 10, 'I've come that you might have life and have it to the full...Whereas the thief comes only to rob and kill and destroy.'  Very very frequently, we have a fundamental, almost unconscious, belief that God will rob or kill or destroy me if I allow myself to fall into His hands.

"But Jesus has come only to destroy what is false in us. The armor with which we attempt to keep ourselves invulnerable to love and keep us from receiving love, the armor of that False Self, must be destroyed, crucified and shattered but only so the real, True Self, the vulnerable self, the loving self, the self made in God's image and likeness can emerge.

"And that is what Jesus is saying here about losing our false life so that we may finally find our true life. Not that this makes the losing part any less painful; it's always going to be painful. We always feel like something necessary to ourselves and our lives is being destroyed and taken away from us. But, at least, this purification of our faith and our trust in the Lord should make this dying a bit easier. We all have to take this great jump of Faith into the Father's arms, just as Jesus did on the Cross."