If I were to ask you what you hold as the most important value in your life, the loss of which would make life unbearable and intolerable for you, what would it be?
About 20 years ago, I attended a seminar on suicide and the elderly. While the suicide of the elderly is not the largest demographic in our society, it is the demographic that is most successful in dying by suicide. There are many losses a person experiences while aging. All these losses can lead to depression, and depression is an illness that can kill people just as readily as heart disease, cancer, and many other illnesses. To illustrate the enormity of loss plays on human life, the psychologist presenting the seminar, had all of us attendees take 5 minutes to list in order of importance the ten things or values in our lives that we held most important. He then told us to scratch out two of them, then three of them and so on until we were down to just one. I really struggled as I scratched out item after item on my list. He then had us scratch the lone remaining item. As a group, we all acknowledged to the presenter how hard it was to choose what to scratch out. He looked at us and remarked, at least you had a choice as to what to eliminate from your list. The elderly have no choice.
In the gospel today Jesus is doing something similar to what I experienced at that seminar. Jesus is telling his apostles to examine what they consider most important in their lives. Is it popularity and acceptance by others? Jesus told the apostles, popularity, acceptance, scratch that off your list. The apostles wanted to call death and destruction on the Samaritans when the Samaritans refused to welcome them. Jesus did not rebuke the Samaritans, Jesus rebuked the apostles.
Are the things we own, the homes in which we live the most important in our lives? Jesus turns to the apostles and tells them to scratch that off their list. They are not to hold their homes and that which they own as the most important value in their lives.
Are our families, our spouses, our children that which we hold the most important in our lives? Jesus pushes the apostles to their very limit by telling them to scratch even their families off their list. Not even the burying of one’s dead family members, which is a very high value for most of us, can even be held as the most important value in one’s life.
What point is Jesus trying to make here? It is simply this. Everything that is tangible and attainable in human life is not long lasting. One’s standing in a community, one’s popularity and acceptance by a community is easily lost. It rarely will last a lifetime. Our homes, all that we have and own is also not lasting. Homes are easily destroyed. All those things that we own can easily be broken, stolen, or lost. All the relationships that we have and value, our family members, our friends, are just as easily lost by disagreements, distance, or death. As important as they may be to us, these important relationships will eventually leave us at some point in time in our life.
What is the most important value in our life? What is everlasting? The most important thing in our life is our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us. That is ultimately the highest value in our lives! Jesus refers to this special relationship as the Kingdom of God or the Reign of God. It is only the Reign of God that can withstand time and hardship in our lives. The Reign of God cannot be stolen. It cannot be destroyed. It is indestructible and timeless. The Reign of God is forever. That is why Jesus insists that the Reign of God must be the highest and most important value in our lives. Jesus asks us whether we are willing to abandon everything that has value in our lives for the Reign of God. When we hold God’s relationship with us as such a high value, we will find that everything we hold important, even our family relationships, pale in comparison.
St. Paul expresses the permanency of God’s relationship with us in his letter to the Romans when he asks the question, “What will separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul writes, “Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neithouer death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
(Epilogue) If you are wondering what I listed as the highest value on the list I made in that seminar twenty years ago, well so did Ruthie when she heard this homily yesterday. She asked, “Where was I on that list, number 9?” I said, “no darling, you were number two. I can’t tell you how much it pained me to scratch you off the list.” The words I wrote as number one on my list that day were the words, “the love of God.” I didn’t have to scratch that one out because I knew that the love of God, my relationship with God, the Kingdom of God is permanent. It is forever.
