23C22.    Wisdom 9:13-18b.     “Who can know God’s counsel?  God’s wisdom or capacity to see the entirety of truth, because God is infinite and we are finite, is beyond our capacity to grasp the whole of truth on our own.  It is presumptuous to think we can do better than God; and yet, human beings do it all the time.  Only when we think as God thinks and not as human beings do, do we truly get it right. (Matthew 16:23c) “And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.”

Luke 14:25-33.  Jesus said to the crowds, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”  Jesus also said in John 13:34: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”  The measure of our loving as followers of Jesus is to love as Jesus loved and NOT to love out of our natural human desire and out of our human relations as families and spouses.  It is that we do as Jesus does and not as human beings do that we are Christ followers or Christians.  We are commanded to love God with every bit of our being.  (Matthew 22:37)  All other loves must flow from our love of God and not from our earthly relationships.  “Whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”  Our cross is to live as Jesus calls us to live and not as our human nature or intuition calls us to live.  “Anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”  Everything belongs to God and nothing belongs to us that does not first belong to God.

Philemon 9-10, 12-17.  Paul, who is at this point imprisoned, appeals that the slave Onesimus, who had run away from his master, be graciously accepted back by his owner.  “So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me.”  Paul is calling him and us to act as our loving God acts.