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Jesus lays out two options for us in today’s Gospel. We can either let our relationships with others be our overriding principle or we can allow ourselves to be driven by our relationship with God.
In the end, we can let our relationships with others come first at the expense of our relationship with God or we can let our relationship with God become the very reason for our being. The later choice can be a difficult one. While it is the way of Love in that our following God leads to our “loving our neighbor as ourselves”, it can also split families in two. As Jesus says, “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name.”
It can be hard, if not impossible to understand one another. Some may ask ‘why would you choose God if it means sacrificing your relationship with your family?’ Others will realize that the only path worth taking is the one that leads directly to God, even if it is at the cost of everything else.
Paul, whose conversion we remember today, embodies this. Though he began as a persecutor of the church, just like the wolves Jesus in the Gospel appointed for today, he would give all that up to follow the Lord. Paul was willing to move beyond his relationship with his fellow persecutors, his own people even, to chase after Christ Jesus.
Paul’s approach may seem crazy to some. We will, in fact, hear Paul speak to this on Sunday. Yet those of us who know the true power of a relationship with God, and even those of us who have felt the loss of God and return to Him, know that nothing else is worth more than this relationship, even if others cannot understand us or even persecute us for that connection we have with our Lord.