Love and Hate"

Today's Mass Readings

At first glance today’s readings appear perplexing. In the first reading, from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we are told to “love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Yet in the Gospel reading from Luke, Jesus tells the great crowds following him, “If anyone 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.” What sense can be made of these seemingly opposite commands? Doesn’t the fourth commandment tell us to honor our mother and father? Didn’t Jesus tell us to love even our enemies? How can we honor our parents and love our enemies and yet hate the members of our own family? Can a Christian both love and hate?

With closer inspection, the answer to the paradox of today’s readings may be found in the passages themselves. However, without a proper understanding of love, the answer will elude us. In the contemporary world in which we live, love is often reduced to sentiments and feelings. We speak of “falling” in love and being “madly” in love. We watch films and television shows that portray couples blinded by passion (usually sexual in nature) going to great lengths to achieve bliss. Love, it seems, involves falling and madness. In short, it involves a loss of self. On the radio we gain insight into the darker nature of “love” in the modern world through countless popular songs that lament love gone wrong. Rarely, it seems, are couples living the happiness promised by the gods of the media. Ours is a society of broken individuals, broken promises, and ultimately broken relationships. This is not a surprise. When love is reduced exclusively to an individual’s feelings it becomes self-centered. Self-centered love does not correspond to the portrait of love (of God and neighbor) presented in Scripture by Jesus, who along with the Father and the Holy Spirit is the author of love.

One of the most common images used by Jesus to describe heaven is the “wedding feast.” In fact, Scripture is loaded with nuptial imagery to describe God’s relationship with people. Among the greatest of these are Song of Songs and the Wedding Feast at Cana, where Jesus reveals himself as the Messiah through the Eucharistic miracle of changing water into wine. This same Eucharist, which the Catechism calls the summit of Christian life, enables us to share in the Body and Blood of Christ in a way analogous to the way a husband and wife become “one flesh” in marriage. Christ is the Bridegroom, and the Church is the Bride; thus, we speak of the family as the domestic Church.

Christ’s Eucharistic love for the Church is the paradigm through which we are meant to understand the true meaning of human love. Thus, it is only in the light of Christ that today’s readings make sense. It is no accident that after speaking of hate Jesus immediately speaks of the Cross. Jesus is painting a portrait of love that transforms hatred. It leads through the sinful pain of death and separation (even within our own families) to the resurrection, which brings new life and reconciliation.

How then are we to understand today’s readings? What Paul summarizes in the first reading is the Great Commandment to love given by Jesus himself. Notice that this love has rules! It involves obedience to numerous regulations! It requires behaving in a certain way. Christ’s love does not permit everything and anything. It is not slavery to the self, which becomes slavery to ones own feelings and passions. It is slavery to God, which necessarily orders our feelings and passions towards service of the Creator. In some cases this slavery to the divine limits our personal freedom for the sake of the common good. It involves sacrifice, graciousness, mercy, justice and generosity, even to the point of death. None of us can serve two masters without hating one and becoming a slave to the other. If we love our family (or country or self) first and God second, we will hate God and disrupt our relationships. But if we love God first, we will love our families, nation, self, even our enemies, more authentically, and to benefit of all.

Today many of us are incarcerated by the need to constantly “feel good.” We have become slaves to our feelings. Rather than understanding that God is love and behaving accordingly, we behave as though love is god and behave selfishly. The paradox is that as we Americans strive more and more to achieve happiness and bliss, we are falling deeper and deeper into despair. Recent surveys have found that Americans are increasingly unhappy about their lives and the future, despite having one of the highest standards of living in the history of the world. It seems as a people, like the ancient Israelites before us, we have loved the things of this world but lost site of the Creator who makes them possible.

Michael Lombardo