2017-11-8
朋友们，在今天的福音中，主提出最大的、最“扇耳光”的挑战之一。“如果谁跟随我，他应该爱我，胜过爱自己的父亲、母亲…甚至自己的性命，否则、就不能做我的门徒。”

加强整个福音的重要精神原则是：超脱。精神生活的核心是爱天主，然后为了天主去爱其他一切。但正如圣奥古斯丁所说的，我们罪人陷入爱受造物却忘了造物者的陷阱，从而走入歧途。

当我们把任何低于天主的一切当作天主来爱，麻烦就产生了。所以耶稣告诉祂的酒肉粉丝他们面临一个非常残酷的选择。耶稣应该是我们首要和最终之爱——其他一切都要根据祂来定位。

祂带着典型的犹太人风格，通过鲜明的夸张来论证这个观点：“除非你憎恨你的母亲和父亲、妻子、儿女、姊妹、兄弟…” 是的，如果他们对你来说就像天主一样的话，你就该憎恨他们。因为在那种情况下他们是危险人物。

Friends, in our Gospel today the Lord offers one of the greatest, most "slap you in the face" challenges he ever offered. "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother…and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

There is the great spiritual principle that undergirds the entire Gospel: detachment. The heart of the spiritual life is to love God and then to love everything else for the sake of God. But we sinners, as St. Augustine said, fall into the trap of loving the creature and forgetting the Creator. That's when we get off the rails.

We treat something less than God as God—and trouble ensues. And this is why Jesus tells his fair-weather fans that they have a very stark choice to make. Jesus must be loved first and last—and everything else in their lives has to find its meaning in relation to him.

In typical Semitic fashion, he makes this point through a stark exaggeration: "Unless you hate your mother and father, wife and children, sisters and brothers...." Well yes, hate them in the measure that they have become gods to you. For precisely in that measure are they dangerous.