Daily Reflection Monday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time

The passage from Matthew 10 today is the last part of Jesus’ message to the Twelve before he sent them off on their mission. It is a message charged with urgency, the Apostles are told to just go taking nothing with them and that they will be dependent upon those they preach to and that they may expect persecution. Therefore his phrase, “I have come to bring not peace but the sword,” makes more sense in that context of a persecuted Church, as the very early Church in Jerusalem was. As the gospel of Matthew was addressed to this persecuted Church (because it was principally made up of Jewish converts whose families disowned them and the authorities persecuted for fear of religious contamination of Judaism) where faith in the resurrection had real and often tragic consequences, many could relate to what Jesus was saying here in Matthew.

Following Jesus required a real choice in the early Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. Perhaps a choice between family and faith. Perhaps a choice of persecution. The passage concludes with Matthew’s version of Jesus’ teaching, “Deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me.” They are the ones who are found worthy. It ends with, “and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

To make that choice would bring you the blessing of being a bearer of blessing, and for others, to welcome you as a blessing brings them blessing also for in receiving you as a prophet or a righteous person, they win for themselves a prophet’s reward. To offer the prophet even so much as a glass of water will be rewarded.

It is all a spiritual invitation to, “seek the things that are above.” (Col 3:1b)  That will take a kind of losing one’s self, for Jesus says that only by losing ourselves will we ever find ourselves. But in order to come to lose ourselves in Christ requires that we become willing to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow him. To lose ourselves is to come to the cross without guilt, denial or fear in order to experience the joy of the resurrection. The joy of full forgiveness and of being set free and empowered. The joy of encountering your true self as a child of God.