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.

Of course, in today's Gospel reading, the words of Christ that draw the most attention are those saying that whoever loves his household more than God is not worthy of God. First, they concern everyone without exception, and second, one immediately wants to test oneself by them. Besides, these words often provoke a fairly decisive protest in us, because we are used to treating home as a fortress and considering close relatives the only safe and reliable circle. And Christ's words deprive us of this illusory security and call us to be open to the world. This is difficult, and therefore the human being does not like it.

But it is important to consider the Lord's words about relatives in the context of the whole Gospel passage, more precisely, of the whole second half of chapter 10. The Lord calls the disciples to confess their faith before people without fear. Then He says that in relationships characteristic of this world in its fallen state, the disciples' faith will inevitably meet resistance. This concerns relationships not only with authorities, but with people in general. This very resistance largely explains why the path of following Christ is the way of the cross. And this word of Christ ends with a call to the disciples to build their relationships with people not by the standards of this world, but to receive one another for God's sake.