Wow, today’s gospel is harsh.  Today words like that would put us in the mind of a dangerous cult.  Today any religion that encourages breaking up families, that encourages leaving jobs and abandoning everything we’ve worked for generates suspicion.  We wouldn’t trust a religious leader today who told us to leave our families and leave our jobs and leave our homes and go out with nothing and hope we would be provided for.  We’d have visions of people in airports asking for donations for books, selling roses on interstate ramps, living under assumed names in armed compounds cut off from loving friends and families.

How can our religious leader be asking us to abandon our families and jobs and homes – everything that means anything to us, everything that is safe and secure.  But that’s part of the point of it all.  If we put anything in our lives before God, even if that is our own family, we can’t call ourselves true followers.  If we’re not willing to give up anything to follow Him, how can we say we follow Him?  If we aren’t willing to shake up our security for Christ, how can we call ourselves Christian?  That’s the deal.  Our safe lives, our secure families, our regular jobs make us complacent.

Security makes it too easy to just do what we’ve always done without thinking.  Jesus is entreating people to give up their mundane lives, the surface security, and make a commitment to something beyond themselves.  Jesus didn’t come to continue the status quo.  If everything was already fine, there would have been no need for Him.  He came to change everything.  And if we keep to our safe lives, stay complacent, what will ever change?   

The people who think only of themselves, of their own families, their own lives, will never have anything except that.  Those who have a higher purpose and are willing to sacrifice for that, will in the end have their reward.