NOTES for Mat 19:23-30
It may seem quite logical to us to extend a judgement about one member of a set to all its other members. For example, it would be entirely reasonable to observe that God is wiser and more merciful than Vasya, wiser and more merciful than Petya, and that the same therefore applies to Kolya. And it would seem quite natural that if love for God can be compared with love for, say, one's parents, then spouses could be placed in the same sequence. One might continue Christ's thought in verse 37 like this: “Whoever loves husband or wife more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Yet the Lord did not say this! He said exactly what He said. This is important for understanding how our God regards marriage. He does not compare the love of spouses with love for Himself because, to use mathematical language, these cases are “incomparable.”
As early as the Book of Genesis, the Lord clearly showed that marriage is an entirely special case for Him: “and the two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). In marriage — in the human act of “co-creating” with God, of creating something new from what the Lord has created — His commandment to us to love our neighbour can be realised most fully. A spouse is the person through whose sacrificial love we can best understand how God loves us and how we are called to love Him. By loving our spouse, we can thereby manifest our love for God; one might even say that we love God “in” and “through” another person.
Christ is by no means calling us to renounce these relationships. Nor is this contradicted by the words spoken later in today's reading: “Everyone who has left (...) a wife for My name's sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life” (Mt 19:29). First, this is the Lord's promise to recompense us for our suffering and deprivation, and second, it indicates that although love for one's spouse is very precious to Him, God Himself is more important.