In today’s Gospel, Mark 10: 28-31, Peter complains to the
Lord: “We have given up everything and
followed you.” This statement follows
the passage in which Jesus says how “hard it is for those who have wealth to
enter the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle than for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” For a Jew that statement was mind
bottling. In their minds having riches
was a sign of being blessed. “What do you mean that it is hard for a wealthy
person to enter heaven. If a person who is blessed will, with difficulty, enter
heaven, who will? is the apostles’
reaction.” And then Peter says: “We have
given up everything and followed you.” Jesus responds: “Amen, I say to you, there is
no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or
children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not
receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and
sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life
in the age to come.”
Truly, with Jesus, we are on the road to Calvary, to “persecutions,”
to losses, to situations that will demand a dying within us on a daily basis: a
dying to selfishness, a letting go of demanding that things be the way we want
them to be, the acceptance of our routine being shattered by a kid having a
tantrum, by an adult wanting us to be more generous with our attention, our
time, our talent, in the reality of “being last instead of first,” and so on.
Then, too, there is the dying within everyone when they are called to leave
home for marriage, for religious life, for priesthood, to pursue the single
life style and give one’s all to one’s career or other demands of discipleship.
There is also a dying with the person when leaving home for college (or even
when leaving home to attend kindergarten and the years of school that follow). There’s also the dying in the hearts of
parents when their children leave. None of us escapes the “persecutions” of
life, the annoyances, if you will, of these kinds of “deaths.”
Our strength lies in Jesus’ promise: “Amen, I say to you,
there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or
father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will
not receive… eternal life in the age to come.” Yes, as we dies with Christ, we also rise with Him into eternal life.
This strengthens me? What about you?
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