Year A: 13^th Sunday OT
Matthew 10:37-42

Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy, CMF
Claretian Missionaries

These words of Jesus are uncomfortable. Let us be honest about that first. They scrape against everything we have been taught about a gentle Savior who welcomed children and spoke of birds of the air. Here, suddenly, he speaks of hatred, of crosses, of losing one’s life. I have spent many years trying to soften these verses. I have told myself that Jesus could not possibly mean what he seems to be saying. Surely, he is exaggerating for effect. Surely, he does not actually expect me to love him more than my own mother, my own child. But the Gospel does not ask me to make it comfortable. It asks me to listen.

When Jesus speaks about loving father and mother less, he is not commanding coldness. He is not asking us to become detached, unfeeling creatures who walk away from our families. I have known people who have done exactly that—walked away from family obligations with a kind of pious self-righteousness—and I have seen the wreckage left behind. That is not what Jesus means. Rather, he is warning us about the subtle and terrible danger of turning good things into ultimate things. Our families are good. Our children are good. Our parents are good. But they are not God. And when we place them in the space that only God can occupy, we do not love them more—we love them less. Because we begin to demand from them what they cannot give. We ask our spouses to give us ultimate security. We ask our children to give us meaning. We ask our parents to give us identity. And when they fail—as they inevitably will—we resent them. This is the hidden violence of misplaced love. Jesus asks for the first place not because he is a jealous tyrant, but because only a love that is grounded in the Absolute can truly love the relative. When I love God first, I am freed from demanding that my family act as my savior. I can love them as they are—broken, beautiful, finite—without the crushing weight of expecting them to be infinite.

I have seen what this love costs. In China, I visited the cemetery of the Jesuit missionaries. More than fifty priests are buried there, many of them in their thirties. When they left Europe, they knew they would not return. They would not see their parents again. They would not hold their siblings. They would not be present for the deaths of those they loved. They had made a choice—a terrifying, beautiful, impossible choice—to place God above everything else. Standing among those graves, I felt the weight of what Jesus is asking. This is not a metaphor. This is not a comfortable abstraction. This is the flesh-and-blood reality of men who took up their cross and walked out of their towns, never to return. They did not hate their families. They loved them enough to leave them to a God they trusted more than their own presence. That is the kind of love that reorders everything. That is the kind of love that does not cling but releases.

And then comes the cross. “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” We have domesticated this word too. Cross-shaped jewelry. Crosses on our walls. Crosses on our prayer cards. We have forgotten that the cross was an instrument of terror. It was the Roman Empire’s way of saying: This is what happens to those who resist. It was public, humiliating, agonizing. When Jesus spoke of taking up the cross, His hearers would have seen it with their own eyes—the condemned man stumbling through the streets, the nails, the slow suffocation. To take up the cross meant you had already been sentenced. It meant you were walking out of your town knowing you were never coming back. It meant an absolute break with your past, your comforts, your carefully constructed life. Most of us, if we are honest, do not want this. We want a Christianity that fits neatly alongside our domestic comforts. We want to add Jesus to our lives without subtracting anything. But the cross is not an addition, though its shape looks like one—it is a subtraction. It strips away everything that is not essential. It leaves us with only what cannot be taken. The question is not whether we will have crosses; the question is whether we will take them up.

And then, beautifully, the tone shifts. Jesus moves from the staggering heights of martyrdom to the absolute simplicity of a cup of cold water. There is gentleness here. There is mercy. Jesus knows that not every moment of our lives will be a dramatic crucifixion. Most of our lives are lived in the mundane, ordinary spaces of daily encounter. And it is precisely here, in the small, seemingly insignificant acts of hospitality, that the Kingdom takes root. A cup of cold water. In the ancient Near East, water was life itself. To give it to a traveler, a stranger, or a “little one” was an act of profound recognition. It says, I see you. You matter. Your thirst is my concern. I have seen this hospitality with my own eyes. In Dubai, I noticed that many of the well-to-do natives keep a cold water tap outside their perimeter walls. Passersby—laborers, travelers, strangers—can stop and drink from it. In the desert, that water means life. The heat is oppressive, the thirst is real, and here is a simple act of mercy. A tap. Cold water. Freely given. The wealthy did not need to do this. There was no law requiring it. But they understood something that the Gospel is trying to teach us: that a cup of cold water can hold the weight of eternity. That in a land of scarcity, generosity is not an option—it is survival. That tap outside the wall is a small crucifixion of comfort, a small death to the instinct to hoard. It is the cross made visible in the most ordinary way.

We live in a world that shouts for grand gestures. We measure impact by numbers and visibility. We want to change the world, but we cannot be bothered to notice the person sitting right in front of us. The economy of grace operates on a completely different metric. The Lord does not ask us to save the world by tomorrow morning. He asks us to notice the thirsty person today. The missionaries in China gave their lives—a grand, heroic gesture that we can scarcely comprehend. But most of us are not called to that. We are called to the tap outside the wall. We are called to the simple, unglamorous work of noticing thirst and quenching it. Jesus says that when I give a cup of cold water to one of these little ones—when I do something small and seemingly insignificant—I am receiving him. This is almost too simple. And yet, it is the simplicity that makes it so profound.

The cup of cold water is never just a cup of cold water. It is eternity in a simple gesture. It is the cross made small enough to hold in our hands. It is the love that reorders everything, flowing out from us to a thirsty world.

Let us not rush past the difficult words of the Gospel today. Let us sit with the tension. And let us ask ourselves: What tap of mercy am I being called to install? What thirst am I being called to notice? The water we give is the water we receive. And the life we lose is the life we find.