Fr. Michael Williams

In chapter nineteen of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is asked by a young man, “what good deed must I do to possess eternal life”. Jesus tells him he must keep the commandments. One of those commandments - the fourth one - is ‘Honour your father and mother’. So is Jesus contradicting this commandment, when he says today in chapter ten of Matthew’s gospel, “anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me”.

I think what Jesus is telling us in today’s gospel, is that “love for our parents should not come before love of God” (Navarre). In essence Jesus is telling us that the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul, and not to follow false gods. In other words we need to put Christ in the first place in our lives. He is to be the centre around which we build everything else. Christ is the foundation stone on which we are to construct our lives. If we build our lives on Christ all our other relationships will be informed by Christ and his command to love.

The Saints of the Church always offer us great examples of how to follow Christ and His teachings. A great example of someone who put Christ, even before her family is Margaret Clitherow - a wife and mother from York who lived during the latter half of the sixteenth century. After she converted to Catholicism, Margaret placed God at the centre of her life; He was not an add on extra, but the centre of her life.

Margaret was discovered harbouring priests, who were ministering to the people of York, at the time when Catholicism had been banished from the realm, by King Henry VIII. Margaret could quite easily have rejected her faith and so spend the rest of her days in the company of her husband and children. That would have been the easy option. But Margaret chose to remain steadfast in her faith, knowing this meant the death penalty. She entrusted her family to God, “rather than yield one jot from my faith”. Her heroic faithfulness to God means she is now known as St. Margaret Clitherow, and her home in the Shambles in York is a place of pilgrimage.

Margaret knew that “anyone who does not take up the cross and follow in [Christ’s] footsteps is not worthy of [Him]”. Margaret, like countless others down the ages, lived her baptism perfectly. She knew that “when we were baptised in Christ Jesus we were baptised in his death…so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life”. Margaret died with Christ, so that she might live a new life. She knew being a follower of the Lord meant making some tough decisions. But she was prepared to lose her life in this world, so as to find it again with Christ forever in Heaven. There have been countless faithful Christians down the ages, often unknown, who place Christ at the centre of their lives.

We probably won’t have to make such a choice as Margaret Clitherow. Nevertheless, we will all at times have to make choices that will involve either putting God first, or putting something else first. People put many things before God today - money, pleasure, people - but Christ is keen to remind us today that nothing should come before Him, as He alone has the power to give us eternal life in Heaven, and not even our parents can do that for us.