Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

 Exhibits Showing That Jesus Is Qualitatively Unique 

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Church of St. Bridget of Minneapolis, MN

Sunday, June 28, 2026

One of the great mistakes people make today is domesticating Jesus. They see him as just one more biblical figure, a nice, gentle figure. They claim to understand his moral teaching, say he is like many other great religious figures, and argue that Jesus echoes what others have said. After making those claims, they simply forget about him. But in his own lifetime and after his Resurrection, Jesus was a deeply unsettling figure. He was disruptive and unnerving. I tell you, there is no religious figure anywhere in the religions and philosophies of the world who is stranger, more demanding, more relentless, more destabilizing, and more provoking than Jesus. There is no guru, no teacher, no political or cultural leader, no professor, no influencer, or founder who is as strange and relentless as Jesus. This makes Christianity, the religion that Jesus founded, the strangest and weirdest of all. A few weeks ago, I was at St. Joseph Church in West St. Paul, and in the course of my homily, I said to the people, “It is okay if some people think you are weird. In fact, be weird.” In case you don’t know it, know it now: Christianity is weird. It is strange. It is counter-cultural and counterintuitive. It turns the values of this world upside down. And if those close to you think you are weird, you may not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven. Why do I say that Jesus is the strangest religious founder of all? 

I present the first exhibit, found in today’s Gospel from Matthew 10:37-42. Speaking to his apostles, Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Apart from romantic love, the most intense forms of love are parental love (deep, enduring, and unconditional affection between parents and their children) and filial love (the love children have for their parents, which is deeply rooted in attachment, survival instinct, and mutual affection. When I was growing up in my family, I experienced my parents’ love for me, and my siblings will say the same. My parents worked so hard and made several demanding sacrifices for the family. When my father died, my mother’s love intensified. She stretched herself, broke her back, and often went beyond her limits just to ensure that the family was cared for, protected, provided for, and nurtured. The sacrifice my mother made was beyond words. Every day, very early in the morning, she would wake up to pray the rosary. Each decade of the rosary she prayed was followed by an intention for her children. My room was next to hers, so I heard her. Usually, after praying the whole rosary alone, she would wake us up and invite us into the living room for a family prayer. I tell you, I didn’t need anyone to tell me about parental love because I experienced it myself. Everything she did for my siblings and me was her highest priority. As years passed, my mom became infirm and needy, and we, her children, felt legitimately bound to care for her until God called her home. But in our Gospel for today, Jesus deliberately summons us to love him more than we love our parents and children. 

I tell you, the Buddha did not say this. He offered a wonderful teaching, the “Noble Eightfold Path,” and said he followed it to find happiness, and if you follow it, you can too. Prophet Muhammad did not say what Jesus said. He said he received a revelation from an angel and wants to share it. Even an iconic figure like Moses did not say it either. In fact, God inspired Moses to record a prophecy about Jesus Christ: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him” (Deuteronomy 18:15). Confucius did not say it. The great ancient Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, did not say what Jesus said. And there is no one in the philosophical or religious tradition who said such a strange thing. But Jesus says that your love for him personally has to go beyond the most intense loves of your life. I tell you, this is Christology on full display. It is as high as the Christology we see in the Prologue of the Gospel of John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In those words, John tells us that Jesus is God, and in the demands Jesus makes today, he is also telling us that he is God. Who is the one who should be loved beyond the most intense loves we possibly have? It’s God alone! Those who say that Jesus is merely a teacher or another prophet in the line of many other prophets have obviously not read the lines we heard today. Other religious figures would say something like, “Unless you love the God that I speak of or unless you love the teaching that I offer…” But that’s not what Jesus says. He says, “Unless you love me more than your children and parents, you are not worthy of me.” Jesus would not utter those words unless he himself were, in person, the Summum Bonum, the highest Good. This is what is at stake in Christianity. You cannot understand Christianity and still be neutral about Jesus. This is the reason Jesus said, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). 

Now, before you say, “Wow, this is too much to handle,” listen to the second exhibit: Jesus says, “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.” Today, we associate the cross with suffering, inconvenience, and accepting life’s pains with joy, patience, and total surrender to God. We have been told, “When a bad thing happens to you, and you try your best to shake it off, but the problem persists, just offer it up to God and accept it joyfully and patiently as your own share in the cross and sufferings of Christ.” But that is not what the Lord is saying here. He says, “Whoever does not take up his cross…” In other words, don’t run away from the cross; seek it out on your own. Don’t just accept it when it accidentally falls on you without your involvement. Just as Jesus took up his cross so that he might bear the sins of the world and take them away, just as he paid the price we owed, just as he bore our burdens, so we must actively bear the burdens of others. As you go about your daily life, strive to take on someone else's burdens. Look for someone who is carrying a burden and try to lighten it. Look for someone whose cross you can pick up, the way Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus carry his. If Jesus asks you right now, “Do you love me more than your children?” Many of you might say, “Yes, Lord,” especially if your children have, over the years, been distant from you. And if Jesus asks you, “Do you love me more than your father and mother?” Many of you may say, “Yes, Lord,” especially if there is less connection between you and your parents. Some adults are still angry with their parents for correcting their misbehavior when they were young. Some of those would be glad to say, “Lord, I love you more than my parents.” But the bigger test Jesus gives us today is: “Are you willing to carry another’s cross and bear another’s burdens? And mind you, that cross, that burden includes the one from your household, your family, and those of other people. If you resist this, Jesus says, “You are not worthy of me.” 

In the third exhibit, Jesus says, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” What does it mean to find your life? It means using every means possible—legitimate or not—to acquire wealth, power, honor, and pleasure and to make them your god. For people like this, the means to what they want don’t matter because the end justifies the means. But what happens in the end? All those acquisitions will fizzle away. Yet the one who “loses his life for my sake”—that is, the one who willingly bears others’ burdens out of love—will find his life. So the true Christian formula is this: love Jesus more than you love your own parents, children, and life, and then do what Jesus did—bear people’s burdens. If we live by these principles, we will find life, become effective ambassadors for Christ, and draw people into the divine life. Don’t forget this—the Father sends the Son, and the Son sends us. When people see us as an image of the Son, they will be drawn to the Son and, therefore, to the Father. 

God bless you!