Climbing Everest

Today, I reflect on Jesus’ challenging call to discipleship, which asks us to place love for God above all else—even family and possessions. Drawing on the image of climbing a mountain, I explore how following Christ demands wholehearted commitment, not just casual faith. Inspired by Saint John of the Cross, I encourage us to seek freedom by letting go of attachments and to cultivate a deep, habitual desire to imitate Jesus. Together, as a parish community, we are invited to journey towards union with God, embracing the cost and the joy of true discipleship.

00:00:00 Now I have an interest in politics that is slightly greater than my interest in sports, which is a pretty low bar. But I don’t think that Jesus is being a very good political player today. Thankfully, we have young Luke here today who works for the Labor Party. And so if you were suggesting to a candidate that they promote the will of the party by saying, you know, vote for me and I will make sure that you suffer, vote for me and I’ll make sure that you lose money. Vote for me and I’ll make sure that you hate everybody that is important in your life. Do you think that would go down well? Probably not. No. Not even for the Labor Party! We love the Labor Party. Come on. It’s a good thing. And yet, this is kind of what Jesus seems to be inviting to do, and especially on Father’s Day to say, if you don’t come to me without hating your father, your mother. I mean, there’s times when that’s probably an easy thing to do, but it kind of there’s all these things that just seems very strange, very odd to make sense of today.

00:01:19 I think that it’s not so much about a political kind of maneuver, but Jesus is wanting us to understand that this isn’t something that we casually undertake. It’s more like someone who is preparing to climb Mount Everest. Now, again, I’ve never done that and I’ve never been a mountain climber. I’ve only ever stayed on the well-marked trails with steps and ladders and things like that. Even [climbing with] ropes begin to kind of freak me out a bit. But we’re invited into this experience that is, you know, so much more. I mean, anyone that undertakes that the climb of any significant mountain. Has to be dedicated, has to be committed. You have to go into a training regime. They have to be prepared to do something that is extraordinary. And yet they do it because the achievement is worth it. They do it because they’re able to stand on that summit where so few have done and be able to, you know, to take in the vistas and to see the wonders of what is available there.

00:02:28 The way of discipleship is not the easy stroll along a well-marked path. It does invite us into this deeper commitment. And yet it is this commitment that requires everything from us. Because Jesus surely is worth everything. There is a wisdom that we’re invited into to really experience what God is asking of us today. And so that first experience of hating everyone in our family, we would call that as a mysticism, something that within the the logic of the ancient Near East just made sense. You made these very extraordinary contrasts between this thing and that. And Jesus uses this strong word of of hate, not because he’s inviting us to hate. He’s inviting us, of course, to love, but in comparison, in contrast to the way of God. Everything else just has to fall a distant second to love and honor the Lord. That is our call to serve God alone, to to bring everything into that desire to place the worship of God at the very center of our lives. That everything else has to be oriented around that central commitment.

00:03:51 And it is a huge commitment that we need to make within our lives. And so, in contrast to our love of God, everything else feels like hatred. Everything else feels like this, this foreign experience and reality because he’s inviting us into this freedom, this embrace of this love that is so extraordinary and so central to us. And how do we do that? He gets even rougher, it seems, in that unless you take up your cross and follow now we have little symbols that we wear around our necks, little kind of images that remind us of the cross. But in the first century they knew what the cross was. You know, when we look up at the sign of Jesus on the cross, you know, it’s a sign of brutality. It’s a sign of torture. It’s a sign of horror. It’s, you know, we see awful images from Gaza on a regular basis of just seeing the absolute devastation and destruction there. You know, the cross was kind of like that, just this symbol of stupidity, of horror, of torture.

00:05:03 And Jesus is inviting us to take up our cross in the same way that, again, it doesn’t make any sense for someone politically minded to say that this is the way that you are invited into this space of freedom. And yet this is what Jesus wants of us. Not just a casual attendance of mass, not just a passive thing that really doesn’t ask too much of us. That Jesus is inviting us into this extraordinary commitment to say that everything in my life is going to be directed and oriented around my desire for God. Everything in my life is is going to be so focused and so fulfilled only in God that everything else just begins to fall away. And so even the third condition that Jesus sets today for the way of discipleship, to give up everything to to let go of all of your possessions, that clearly that is also this way of freedom and of If anything is in my life, then I put a higher priority on it. Over God. Then I need to be free of that. I need to to let go of all of those things.

00:06:12 I’m always drawn back to one of the teachings of Saint John of the cross. I’ve probably quoted it before. It’s in the the first book of the ascent of Mount Carmel towards the end. He’s giving you a whole series of teachings about how we can be free, how we can get rid of all of the the things that kind of guide us and and direct us, that prevent us from being free to serve and to follow the Lord. And he gives this one little sentence that provides a summary of all that he said before. He says, have an habitual desire to imitate Jesus, to imitate Christ in all that you do by bringing your life into conformity with his. It’s a much longer kind of statement, but it brings, you know, our parish mission into focus. You have that habitual desire. It’s not simply about just having that one thing that we. We do in our lives and we say, yes, yes, I’ll make a commitment. No, it’s got to be habitual. Make that habitual desire.

00:07:13 So it’s something that we do long for, something that we do want with everything within us, have an habitual desire to imitate Jesus. Well, how do we imitate Jesus? How do we bring our life into conformity with him? That’s how we get to know Jesus is by reading the Gospels, is by spending time in prayer each day, by letting the the mind of Jesus slowly change our own minds so that we can begin to think with the thoughts of Jesus. We begin to have that same desire that Jesus has. We can begin to change and reorient our whole lives according to the filter that Jesus brings to us. That experience of being loved and tenderly desiring that we would share that with others. To have this habitual desire to imitate Jesus in all that we do, by bringing our life into conformity with his. That’s our intention, that’s our desire, and that’s what this gospel is inviting us so strongly and so challenging today for us, that we indeed long to climb the mountain of the Lord. And it’s this wonder that Saint John of the cross also uses that image of the ascent of Mount Carmel.

00:08:27 That’s that’s what this is about, this longing to reach the very heights of our union with the Lord. That means surrendering everything else. That means getting rid of anything that will be in the way of that. And along that way, we’re changed. Along that way, we begin to discover that love. Along that way, we begin to be changed so that we can also bring others into union. With that, we can invite our neighbors also to join us along this path of following and knowing the Lord and letting that love change us to be that community that together ascends the mountain of the Lord.