Our Gospel for this Sunday is provocative. But it's important not to change it from a provocation into a scandal. In this passage from Matthew, the Lord is not putting his followers on the horns of a dilemma.
Jesus is not saying, you can either love your father and mother or you can love me. He is not telling his disciples, you can either love your children or love me. This would hardly be teaching worthy of the same God who made the fourth of his ten commandments the command to honor your father and mother and making that the only commandment with a promise attached for those who keep it.
It's often noted that the ten commandments are about loving God and neighbor. This is true. The first three are about loving God and final six are about loving our neighbor. But that's only nine, you might say.
While making clear that love is not a feeling but an act of the will, that is, a decision that shapes one's words and actions, the fourth commandment, falling as it does between the commandments about loving God and those about loving your neighbor, places your parents between God and other people. There is a corollary to this in how we honor the Blessed Virgin Mary, which falls between worshipping God and venerating the saints.
For those of us who are parents being between God and other people when it comes to your children, is quite daunting, even distressing. This should also be daunting for children. While all of us are not parents, each of us is a child of parents.
As is usually the case, what the Lord is saying is profound and points to a number of things at the same time. One of those things is that no other person can bear the weight of your need. One of the easiest ways to weigh down or even break a relationship is to require more of another the s/he can realistically give.
With that in mind, consider what we hear Jesus say today as an extension of last week's Gospel. If you remember he taught of God's unfailing love, of his care and concern, for each of us. I think today's teaching is also linked to something found in the next chapter of Saint Matthew's Gospel, namely the Lord's invitation to take up his easy and light yoke.1
Experiencing the love of God is life-changing. Once you experience God's unfailing and unconditional love, you can't help but understand the core of Jesus' teaching in our Gospel passage today: it is only by loving him more than anyone and everyone, which love can only ever be a response to his love, that you can love others as you should.
No matter how you want to "frame" it, loving Christ first and foremost is the foundation of the ordo amoris. As the Lord's teaching in our passage shows, genuine love of Christ inevitably overflows to love of neighbor, be s/he prophet, thirsting disciple, righteous person, or, anyone you might encounter.
To receive Christ is not in the first place (or in the last place) to assent to a set of Christological propositions carefully formulated and philogically honed. To receive Christ is to open yourself to receive his all-encompassing, all-consuming love. It is then that, to paraphrase the Rule of Saint Benedict, you can receive others as Christ himself.2
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