"You will be hated by all because of my name”
"You will be hated by all because of my name”, says the Lord Jesus in today's Gospel. It must be admitted that amazingly often the Catholic Church and Catholics - I mean Catholics who clearly identify with their Church - are mocked, hated, slandered and given epithets. Defenders of abortion and euthanasia, theosophists and Jehovah's witnesses, feminists and animal defenders, proponents of alternative morality and sex shop owners, supporters of the extreme left and the extreme right often express their anti-Catholic views.
Hatred is the denial of love, it is even more than the denial of love, it is active anti-love. Very often, the one who hates wants to be hated himself. If you hate anyone, you are thereby throwing in the slogan to build a world without God. Because God is love.
Therefore, if it happens to us that someone hates us, our first impulse should be to check whether we are giving any reasons for this hatred. Understudying someone else's point of view, fixing what should be fixed, and yieldingwhere it is allowed to yield - sometimes it dries up the sources of hatred.
However, where resignation would be a betrayal of God and a betrayal of the truth, we must not give up, even if we are hated for it. For example, under pressure from abortion advocates, we cannot stop proclaiming that conceived children must never be killed. Nor will we give way to the Theosophists and agree with them that the Lord Jesus is equal to the Buddha. And we prefer to expose ourselves to someone's hatred rather than fail to teach that alternative morality offends God and offends human dignity.
But beware: Just being faithful to Christ's teaching, being faithful even at the cost of exposing ourselves to someone's hatred, does not automatically make us Christ's disciples. We are truly a disciple of Christ only if we strive to bless those who hate us and wish them good and love them. For Christ himself - as the Apostle Peter beautifully wrote - " When he was insulted, he returned no insult; when he suffered, he did not threaten; instead, he handed himself over to the one who judges justly". (cf. 1 Pet 2:23).
Until Tomorrow
fr. george