Gospel Reflection on Matthew 10:37-42
- Jun 26
- 3 min read
June 28, 2026
He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.
“He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward, and he who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward. And whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.”
-----
During the 1990s, the New Age era, Christianity was transformed into systems aimed at producing our well-being, a sense of well-being.
And in many cases, the well-being we were after was focused on realizing absolutes we had inherited from our original families. There are many absolutes that come to us from our infancy. Habits formed in times of discontent by virtue of the different roles we had to assume, compensations that we yearned for, deficiencies that we experienced and compensated for in different fashions.
And we defend these absolutes every time we say, "That's just the way I am." It's true our parents and childhood shaped much of who we are today, but if we keep obeying the dictates of these infantile structures, we are never going to arrive at our real capacity for loving according to God.
The gospel is always about destabilizing our life, throwing our familiar life upside down, and calling us to a life that's not simply the life that we receive from our families.
It's not possible to follow Christ if we simply follow the urges of our infantile survival schemes. How many Saints have had to go against their family's absolutes to live out the greatness of their vocations? Just think of Francis of Assisi handing his clothes back to his father and breaking his dependence on him.
This is the generativity that we're called to, to be born into a new life, to pass from the life given to us by our parents to a life that's born from above, as Jesus tells Nicodemus, to live under a different Father.
Because we've often diminished Christianity to something horizontal, something that suits our material interests, we end up reducing it to a moral message and nothing more.
It's interesting in the catacombs of Rome that the early Christians measured the days of their lives as beginning from the moment of their baptism. They took new names, just as Christ gave new names to some of his disciples to show that they were becoming different people, entering a different life, a greater life.
Jesus called God Father. His family was God's family. As Pope Francis was fond of saying, "todos, todos, todos, everyone, everyone, no more favorites." Everyone without distinction. In this family, everyone is father, mother, sister, brother. Family identity for these disciples even includes creation. Because of that, those who are suffering deserve our special concern.
Jesus wanted disciples to be open to family-style relationships with anyone with whom they came in contact: so whoever's that he appeals to, are ready to lose their life, to act in Jesus' name, to develop an identity that includes more and more relations. The one who receives a prophet or a righteous person, the one who gives cold water to a little one, all of these share an identity with those whom they serve and with Christ. That's Jesus' idea of family. Acting like family, we become family.
---
Comments