“If anyone comes to Me without hating
his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and
even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.”
Huh? What? Hate? Did Jesus really
say this? What did He mean?
We all have lots of questions when we
hear this weekend's Gospel reading. It's shocking and a little
scary, and it wakes us up. And that's exactly what Jesus meant to
do.
To understand Jesus' statement, we need
to first off understand something about the expressions of the
Semitic culture in which Jesus lived. This culture was prone to
exaggerated statements that got people's attention by shocking the
daylights out of them. And certainly that's what Jesus is doing
here. He wants us to be shocked so we pay attention and think deeply
about His words.
Second, we must understand the meaning
of the word “hate” in the original language. When I say
“original language” here, though, I don't mean Greek this time.
I mean Aramaic, the language Jesus and His disciples used in their
common, everyday speech. Aramaic doesn't have a structure of
comparatives. There isn't a way to say greater or less, better or
best, worse or worst.
So the word “hate” had a much
broader range of meaning in Aramaic than it does in Greek or English.
It could mean everything from despising someone to renouncing
someone to detaching oneself from someone to loving someone less than
another.
Even in English, we use the word “hate”
more broadly than our first impressions suggest. We might say, “I
hate it!” about beets and really mean that they don't suit our
taste at all. We might exclaim, “I hate that I did that!” and
mean that we renounce our action and are sorry for it. We might even
remark, “I hate to say it, but...” and mean that we reject (more
or less) having to express an opinion or a fact.
When we examine Jesus' words in the
broader context of His teachings, we know right away that He is not
telling us to despise people or hurt them deliberately. This is,
after all, the same Jesus Who tells us to love our neighbor as
ourselves and, even more, as He loves us. What He means here is that
we must choose Him above all else in our lives, even the people
closest to us. We must love Him more than we love them even to the
point of detaching ourselves from them if we must.
We might wonder, then, why Luke chose
to render Jesus' Aramaic word and Semitic idiom as the strong word
“hate” in the Greek. Matthew did not. He translated the idiom
rather than the word (and this helps us understand Luke's version
better): “Whoever
loves father or mother more than Me
is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me
is not worthy of Me...”
(Matthew
10:37). So why did Luke, inspired by the Holy Spirit, leave the word
“hate” in place?
Perhaps
he could see that people would need
a
strong message like this in the future. Perhaps he
knew that the shock value of the statement would get people thinking
and talking. Perhaps he realized that Christians would sometimes
face difficult choices and need to hear strong words to help them
choose rightly.
And
he was correct. Christians of every time and place have needed a
strong reminder to put Christ first in their lives and keep Him
there. Those who faced martyrdom, for example, sometimes had to tune
out the pleas of their grieving families. “Remember us!” they
may have cried. “Think of us! What will happen to us if you die?
Can't you just say the words they want to hear without meaning them
in your heart?” “No,”
the martyr had to respond. “I love you, but I love Jesus more, and
I will not renounce Him for anything in the world, even if it means
leaving you behind.”
Maybe
the scenario
wouldn't even be as dramatic as martyrdom. Picture a family in
poverty. The man has a chance to earn some extra money, but it would
mean doing something morally wrong. His
wife
might encourage him to ignore his conscience just this once. “It's
not much,” she might urge, “just a little thing, and think of how
much that money would mean to our family. Couldn't you just do it
for us?” But
the husband,
if he truly follows Christ, would have to refuse. He would have to
put God's moral law first, trusting that God would provide for his
family.
Divine
love must always take priority over human affections. We
must always choose Christ even when that means acting against the
wishes of our families and friends. We must always strive to draw
our human love up into divine love and to
allow God to love our dear ones through us. Sometimes
this might not look like love to them or to the world. As
we detach ourselves from the world and follow Christ, our choices and
actions might even
seem like hate in
human eyes.
But
it
is not hate.
It is
a love stronger and deeper than any other,
for
when
we
belong to God Who is Love and
when we are filled with His love,
we can love our fellow human beings in a whole
new way,
a way that leads to eternity.
