Today, Our Lord tells us quite directly the place he wants to have in our lives.  He’s not content just to be a friend.  He doesn’t want to be a casual acquaintance.  He doesn’t even want to be like a close family member.  In the holiest possible way, he’s jealous of us.  He wants to be the absolute most important thing in our lives.  And he’s not satisfied with anything less.  Shocking as this idea might be, He wants to be more important to us than our parents; He wants to be more important to us than our children. 

Now of course God isn’t telling us to neglect our children or our parents.  Quite the contrary: remember, this is the same God who gave us the 4th Commandment: Honor your father and mother: a commandment which establishes just how important the relationship between parents and children truly is, even on a moral level.  Love for one’s parents and love for one’s children should be the deepest, most committed love we have in our human relationships.  But Christ wants to be even more.  He wants our love and dedication to him to go beyond even the love and dedication we have for our parents and our children.  That’s a little shocking.  But it makes sense.  Because our relationship with God is our most fundamental relationship.  God is our creator; he’s the reason that we have relationships with our family, with our closest friends, with anyone.  He’s the reason we exist.  He’s the reason we have relationships at all.  And so, none of our other relationships can really make sense, can really function properly, unless we give real energy and attention to the most important and fundamental relationship of all, our relationship with God. 

That’s why it’s so important for us, that’s why God requires us in fact to spend time on that relationship with him. There’s a reason that the first three commandments are the first three.  They’re fundamental.  The commandments that shape our relationship with God come first, because our relationship with God should shape all our other relationships.  That begins with worship: by worshipping God, we acknowledge that he is indeed God and we are his creation: this creates a context in which we can understand everything else in our life.  So even if on a particular day we don’t find coming to Mass or saying our prayers to be particularly exciting, it’s ok: worshipping God is still the most worthwhile, meaningful, and necessary activity in our entire lives.  Very often people will say they don’t pray or come to Mass because they don’t get anything out of it.  And while I would certainly argue that point too, even if it were true, that’s not the reason we’re here, not really.  This isn’t a spiritual drive-through.  We come here fundamentally, not to get something, but to give something, to do something.  To do the most important thing we can do, which is to worship God, at the times and in the manner that he has set forth for us.  To orient our lives properly through this fundamental act of Divine Worship. 

And here’s the thing.  If we give ourselves over to Christ, if we try to worship him regularly, to pray to him sincerely, to serve him faithfully: then we do “get something:” we get everything!  The rewards that he gives us are beyond imagination: true peace, freedom from our sins, joy and purpose in life.  The words of the Blessed Apostle Paul that we heard today can really come true for us in our own lives: we can be dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.  As our Father and creator, who loves us more than we could know or understand, Almighty God deserves first place in our hearts and in our lives.  And if we have the courage to give it to him, our reward will be no less than eternal life.