Christ tells us that there are three conditions for us to be his disciples:
"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple."
"Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple."
"None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
This is no small order. To be Jesus' disciple, to enter into his kingdom, is not a cake walk. It requires a decisive choice. One has got to be willing, as Jesus says elsewhere, to "pluck out one's eyes," to "cut off one's hands" if that's what it takes to follow him (Mt 5:29-30). We have got to be willing even to lose our lives, because it is only the one who loses his life that will find it again in God (Mk 8:35).
Many people today do not recognize the seriousness of the call of Jesus. The people 2000 years ago had a similar problem. For centuries, they anticipated that a Messiah would come, overwhelm all foreign powers, and allow them to ride his coattails to great triumph and riches. They were unprepared for the Cross, for suffering, for struggle.
This teaching of Jesus is very concrete and leads to an examination of conscience. Do we love Jesus more than everyone else? Do we prefer him to parents, to spouses, to children, to our own lives? Do we love him with "all our mind, heart, soul and strength" or does something else get our mind, heart, soul and strength? One of the great temptations of the devil today is what I like to call the "Jesus is part of my life" spiritual cancer. We think that all Jesus wants is for him to be important to us, rather than most important; that all he asks is to be part of our life, rather than the center.
The practical aspects of what Jesus is talking about sometimes are pretty obvious. I remember that when I was on the Cape a few years ago, St. Mark's Gospel came up in which Jesus says, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." I preached on this Gospel as tenderly as I could without watering it down. Nevertheless, after Mass a few couples came to me saying how "hurtful" what I had said was and how such words make it hard for them to come to Mass. I asked them what their personal situation was. In each case, they had been divorced and remarried outside the Church without having even investigated whether their first marriage might have been null from the beginning. After helping them to see that I was merely echoing Jesus' words and that the Church and I were not "making up" a teaching on divorce and remarriage, I asked them whether they love Jesus more than they love their new spouses. They paused. I asked them if they had to make a choice between Jesus and their new spouses, whom would they choose? They paused again. Then one of them asked why they couldn't have "both." I said that might be possible, if their first marriages were null, but until that time, they cannot have both and have to choose. If there is a choice between loving Jesus and following his teaching or loving a second civil spouse and rejecting Jesus' teaching, if a person chooses the latter, then the second civil spouse is a Barabbas in that person's life. Jesus calls us to love him to the point of "hating" all others if we're worthy to be his disciples.
The same thing often comes up in work and family situations. Many times people tell me they cannot come to Mass because they "have to work" or "have to take their kids to an event" or countless other things they "have to" to do on the Lord's day. The reality is that when it comes to compromising one's commitments to God, many people do so easily, but not when it comes to compromising with work, or with sports leagues, and other commitments. If, when there's a conflict between one's obligations to God and one's obligations to something else, if God loses, then one is not truly being a disciple, for a true disciple puts God first.
