God never holds in contempt or despises what He created. Sin and wrongdoing are not part of his creation, though his rational creatures are allowed to pervert and disrupt the good order he created. Even when what was created good turns to evil, God continues to love and seeks to save. The family is something good, and an organization willed by the Creator. When Jesus talks about who his true family members are, he is not suggesting we destroy the natural order he himself established within a household. What he is saying, however, is that something good can become bad if we make it more essential than the Word of God. Think about how essential family bonds are for human life. What Jesus is saying is that the relationship we have with our Heavenly Father is even more essential. The human family is a foundation for our life to the extent that it encourages and allows us to consider all others brothers and sisters. It grounds us well if it opens our hearts to the Father’s will.
Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
GREGORY OF NANZIANZUS:
It is a sad thing that we watch for opportunities against each other and having destroyed our fellowship of spirit by diversities of opinion have become almost more inhuman and savage to one another than even the barbarians who are now engaged in war against us, banded together against us by the Trinity whom we have separated. We are not foreigners making forays and raids upon foreigners or nations of a different language, which is some little consolation in the calamity. But we are making war upon one another, and almost upon those of the same household. Or if you will, we the members of the same body are consuming and being consumed by one another. Nor is this, bad as it is, the extent of our calamity, for we even regard our diminution as a gain. But since we are in such a condition and regulate our faith by the times, let us compare the times with one another; you your emperor, and I my sovereigns; you Ahab and I Josiah.