Jesus' words are very difficult for us. We would like things to be simpler... Is everything really so stark? Are His ways of ordering the world truly incompatible with ours, and does following Him necessarily require us to give up what seems right to us? On the way to unity, must we really pass through division; on the way to love, through hostility; on the way to glory, through the cross; on the way to true life, through death?

Sometimes the words of Jesus seem too harsh. What, in fact, does He mean when He says that one cannot love father or mother more than Him? And then comes the explanation: whoever wants to save his life (“soul”) will lose it, but whoever gives it up for Christ’s sake will save it.

At first glance it may seem that this is about some life after death, about the paradise that awaits martyrs. But in fact here too the point is the Kingdom. The Kingdom that is not somewhere “in heaven” and not later, but here and now. And not some other life that awaits the faithful in some other dimension, but that very life to which every Christian can and must, if he truly is a Christian, be joined already here and now.

But in order for participation in the life of the Kingdom to become possible, it is necessary to renounce one’s own life. Not because it is life, but because it is one’s own. And one’s own not in the sense of unique and unrepeatable, given by God to me and to no one else, so that no one but me can answer for it before God, but in the sense of belonging only to me alone: the life into which I will let no one and which I will share with no one, fearing to lose even a small portion of my so precious life. Such a desire to hold on to one’s own life, separate from the rest of God’s world and from the Kingdom, in the end inevitably turns into catastrophe: all attempts to preserve the little that remains to us in the fallen world from the fullness of the life once given us by God end with our losing even that little. Only by renouncing such spiritual and, in the language of modern philosophers, existential self-isolation can we receive the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that the Savior has prepared for us.

But then one will have to give up the small for the sake of the infinite, limitation for the sake of fullness. And not only with regard to one’s own life, but also with regard to relationships with people, even the closest. For relationships with them too must cease to be part of our small, isolated little world in order to become part of the Kingdom. Then there will no longer be those irrevocable losses to which this little world condemns us. For the life of the Kingdom is, according to the Savior’s word, “life in abundance.” And it is given to everyone who enters the Kingdom. The one who enters brings into it all the relationships that bind him to those close to him. Relationships that also become part of the Kingdom.

At first the words that a disciple cannot become greater than his teacher can appear to limit his possibilities. But if we take into account that to become like the teacher is already no small thing, and that not everyone is able to become equal to him, then here we can see a call to growth. If the matter is discipleship to Christ, then the call to become like the Teacher reveals to us His special attitude toward those who follow Him. For the matter concerns the high level to which Christ intends to raise fallen humanity - He wants to deify us.

And even in the stern words of warning that Christ will deny the one who denies Him, we can see how highly He has placed the human person. For relationships are implied here that almost make one think of equality...

Of course, it would be enormous insolence on such a basis to forget reverence before His majesty and to introduce familiarity into relations with Him. He did not become one of human beings so that we would bring into spiritual life what is "human, all too human," that is, in the words of one author, "always something animal." But what draws us near to God is a gift that imposes responsibility.