Love is one of the strangest of human phenomena. We search desperately for it, long for its bliss, and cry to high heaven for that special someone. In many ways, we can even gain the whole world and yet have nothing, without love. Sometimes people scoff at priests when we try and give advice about love. They say, “You’re a celibate weirdo. What do you possibly know about love?” Granted, I am a weirdo, but not because I have chosen the narrow path of celibacy. Yes the world can ridicule someone like me and that’s perfectly fine; I wasn’t trying to impress them anyway. In fact, I dare say, this Shakespearean drama of love can become even more intense, not less. For our priestly feeble hearts are just as thirsty and finicky as anyone else, with one striking difference: our hearts has been entirely promised to a divinely illusive man named Jesus Christ.

One of the most truthful statements about love I have read came from Pope John Paul II in 1979. In his encyclical letter Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), the pope writes: “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.”  How true these words are. Life makes no sense if we are not first loved. How deep the wounds can pierce when love goes amiss. Is it any wonder that when we encounter authentic love we cling to it with a tenacity of gravity? It could be the love between mother and son, father and child, between brother and sister, and yes of course, between heart-throbbed lovers.

This is what makes the words of Jesus Christ in today’s Gospel so utterly baffling to me. Knowing our frantic craving for human love (for he designed them himself!), he tells us to our face: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (See Luke 14:25) In other words, we must despise those we cherish the most if we want to be faithful Christians. How can this be? It seems opposite to all that I strived to achieve in my relationships. And yet his words seem as cold as ice.  There has to be more to this teacher than meets the eye. First, we have to remember that “God is love.” (See 1 John 4:7) He is the source of love, its strength and its ultimate finality. For without God, we could not even have the ability to love those we love. In fact, our loved ones would not even exist if he did not will them into being. If we are honest without ourselves, we know deep down inside that we love imperfectly, no matter how hard we way try, we fail.  With that hard truth in mind, listen again to the words of Jesus: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus invites each of us now, to learn how to truly love, the way he loves, which is the way God loves. It is only from him, can we finally begin to love our “father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters” the holy way. Paradoxically, we first learn to “hate” before we can truly learn to love.