Loving...and Hating

Last week we began to talk about what it means to be a "disciple." A disciple is someone who follows the teachings and advice of another; a disciple is someone who is motivated and inspired by another to choose a certain pathway in life; a disciple is someone who watches the example of another and attempts to mimic the other's behavior. In its most simplistic sense, a disciple is a learner, a student--a pupil.

Being a disciple is not automatically a good thing. Disciples can follow either good leaders or bad leaders. For the most part, disciples can be no better than the teachers they follow. A committed disciple of Mother Theresa will be radically different from a committed disciple of Charles Manson (do you remember him?).

Next week we'll look at the sacrificial life of the disciple--Laying It All On the Line. Then in two weeks, we'll look at a life of surrender--Giving It Up. Today, however, we're going to look at a very troubling statement--something that seems at first glance to be quite unreasonable. And yet, Jesus made this unreasonable demand on his followers.

You'll find it in Luke 14:25-26.

²⁵ Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: ²⁶ "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.

Jesus says: If you want to follow me, you can't really be my disciple unless you learn to hate. In fact, if you don't hate, you cannot be my disciple.

Does Jesus really want us to HATE?

We know from other passages in the Bible that Jesus wants us to LOVE one another. He tells us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. He even tells us to LOVE our enemies! Jesus says that a man should be united to his wife, and later in the NT we read (we talked about it just a couple of weeks ago) that a man should love his wife as Christ loved the church--to be willing to lay his life down for her.

The Bible also says that if we hate a brother, we cannot really love God (1 Jn 4:20).

So with all this talk about Christian love, why in this teaching does Jesus tell his disciples to forget about loving the members of their family? Why does Jesus tell us to HATE father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters?

Skeptics and critics will say: Aha! You see! The Bible contradicts itself. It quotes Jesus telling us to do two things that are mutually exclusive. You cannot LOVE and HATE someone at the same time. It's impossible.

How do we answer the skeptic? How do we explain this apparent contradiction? Can we balance this extreme level of commitment that's required of a disciple of Christ with the other verses in the Bible about loving others?

Some point out that there is a basic rule in Bible interpretation--that an individual, particular teaching must be interpreted in light of the more general, broader teaching. There must be some other explanation, they say, because Jesus would not dismantle his primary, core teachings about love with some extreme statement about hate.

As a result, some English translations try to soften the impact of Jesus' words in this passage a bit, making them more palatable:

NLT: "If you want to be my disciple, you must hate everyone else by comparison--your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple.

TEV: "Whoever comes to me cannot be my disciple unless he loves me more than he loves his father and his mother, his wife and his children, his brothers and his sisters, and himself as well."

Even Matthews parallel account (10:37): "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

But I think Jesus deliberately used this harsh language for a reason! He didn't want us to squirm out of the dilemma too easily. He wanted us to wrestle with what it means to be a follower of Christ. He wanted us to count the cost of putting him in first place in our lives.

Sometimes people have to choose between those the people they love and Jesus. Sometimes family members will refuse to accept a person's decision to follow Christ: If you become a Christian, they say, then you're no son of ours! You're no longer our daughter.

We see this in the news with some Muslim conversions today.

Jewish conversions: Chava in Fiddler On the Roof. Chava gathers the courage to ask her father, Tevye, to allow her marriage to Fyedka, a Gentile. Tevye reaches deep into his soul, but marriage outside the Jewish faith  is a line he cannot cross. He forbids Chava ever to speak to Fyedka again. Instead, Chava elopes with Fyedka, later returning to try to reason with him, but he refuses to speak to her and tells the rest of the family to consider her dead.

Is this why Jesus used such harsh language? Bible commentaries talk about literary techniques like hyperbole: a figure of speech that exaggerates for emphasis--to get the attention of the listeners. A hyperbole is an extreme statement--one that goes way over the top in order to make a point. It is not intended to be taken in a literal sense.

If Bob tells Sue that he loves her so much that "he'd walk a thousand miles just to be with her," he's using hyperbole. We don't expect him to literally hike 1,000 miles on foot to prove his love. But we DO understand that he loves her a lot because he's using a very effective method of communicating.

Jesus used hyperbole to wake us up. He didn't intend for it to be taken literally. Instead, his words were intended to jar us out of our lackadaisical attitudes. To startle us, to shake us, to smack us, to offend our sensitivities.

Jesus didn't want his listeners to instantly say, Oh, he obviously doesn't really mean that! Not really. No, this is merely to show that our love for family can't be compared to our love for Jesus.

I don't believe that Jesus wants us to explain things away so quickly. He doesn't want us to dismiss the issue casually without thinking about it carefully. He wants us to feel the tension. He wants us to experience this intense tug-o-war in our hearts between our loyalties. He wants us to come to grips with the fact that we are being pulled in two directions.

So Jesus said we should "hate" our family--the same word for how we're supposed to feel about lawlessness and sin (Heb 1:9). Jesus used strong language because he wanted to make a strong statement: To be his disciple, we must be committed to him above everything else. In a tug-o-war, he wins everytime.

My Upmost for His Highest (by Oswald Chambers) "The Conditions Of Discipleship": If the closest relationships of life clash with the claims of Jesus Christ, He says it must be instant obedience to Himself. Discipleship means personal, passionate devotion to a Person, Our Lord Jesus Christ... To be a disciple is to be a devoted love-slave of the Lord Jesus...

We cannot love him like we love our family members. Our love for him must be "off the charts" by comparison.

Imagine comparing your family budget to the national budget. Imagine putting your budget on a graph alongside the national budget. Say you have $60,000 coming in and you put it on a graph. It might look like this...
But if you put it on a graph that shows the U.S. budget with $1.3 trillion coming in, your income would look like this...
It's so small, so miniscule, that by comparison it looks like nothing. It might as well be no income at all. Maybe that's a bit like the picture of the love and devotion and loyalty that Jesus was demanding of his disciples.

But maybe the picture goes even deeper than that.

Let's suppose you have a certain capacity for love. You've got so much love you can share. How do you measure love? In cups? In pints? In gallons? In barrels? And you show love by giving your time, your gifts, your affection. You don't have an infinite capacity for love; you can only give so much time and energy to express your love. Your love is limited.
Now let's suppose you have four children and I ask you about how much you love your children. Would you divide your love up equally between them? Would each child get 25 percent of your love quota? What about if another child comes into your home? Would you have to love your first four children less so you'd have some love to give to your fifth child? Would you have to reduce your love for each of them by 5 percent? Would your love go from 25 to 20 percent so 100 percent of your love is distributed equally between your five children?

I think we can see how tricky it is to define our capacity for love. And I suspect that Jesus was not as concerned about the quantity of our love as much as he was concerned about the depth of our love.

I can say that I love pizza...but it doesn't mean anything like what I mean when I say I love my wife. It's love of a different kind. It's love on a different scale. There's a different depth and quality in the love I have for my wife.

I wonder if that's something like the contrast Jesus sets up here: Love your father and mother, your wife and children, he says. But your greatest and best love must be completely different--and THAT is what you give to me, he says.

Some believe that "hate" as it was used here was a Jewish idiom (a figure of speech using a word in a different way than its normal intended meaning; a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal definition).

Example (Gen 29:30-31): Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah" and the Lord "saw that Leah was hated." Two expressions for the same thing: "hated" meant "to be loved less."

Biblical poetry often paired terms together--a technique called "parallelism." Often the meaning in these pairs depended more on the idiom than the literal meaning.

More than simply using hyperbole and idiom, I think Jesus was also testing his followers.

I wonder if he didn't feel he was becoming too popular. He may have been concerned about having "large crowds" follow him for the wrong reasons--without counting the cost. It seems that he may have been "raising the bar" so his followers would have to ask themselves the question: "How much am I committed to this rabbi? Will I put him ahead of my other loyalties?"

Throughout the Gospel of Luke, you'll notice several times when Luke talks about the large crowds or the increasing crowds following Jesus. Often when Luke mentions the rising popularity of Jesus, he follows up with a difficult or challenging teaching of Jesus--almost as though Jesus were putting people to the test--trying to thin the large crowds.

Certainly American Christianity has often fallen into this trap--where people are tempted to follow Jesus because of what he can do for them, forgetting that Jesus calls them to surrender their lives, their will, their plans to follow him. We talk about the blessings but skip over the commitment; we emphasize the benefits but minimize the costs. Some Americans see Christianity as an easy gospel offering cheap grace--more than a challenging message with a call to sacrifice and pledge to radical discipleship.

Sharon and I used to do kid's crusades--and we could always get the kids to accept Jesus Christ as Savior. We could easily get 90 to 100 percent of the kids to raise their hands and say a prayer! Who doesn't want to go to heaven? It was frustrating to think that kids were doing it because it was the thing to do, because everyone else was doing it, only because of "peer pressure."
So in one crusade, we decided to put the kids to a test. We gave them a choice: Cookies or Jesus? If you'd like to receive Jesus into your hearts, then you come to the front so we can pray with you after the service. All the other kids are going to be dismissed to go outside and have a snack. There will be cookies and juice for those who go outside, but if you want Jesus, then you come to the front.

Discipleship requires that you make some very difficult choices. Some decisions you need to make will lead to mutually exclusive consequences:

When I asked my wife to marry me, that meant she was my choice--the only one. Saying "yes" to one meant saying "no" to millions. (Figuratively speaking.)

You cannot be a missionary serving people in Tanzania AND at the same time serve as pastor of a church in Minnesota. To serve one means you cannot serve the other.

Following Jesus is not only about who you will follow--it's also about you will NOT follow. Discipleship is about both what you WILL do and what you will NOT do. Do you want to sign up? To be his disciple?

By the way: The best way to love someone (wife, children, parents) is to love Jesus more. If your love for Jesus is "off the charts," then you will be better prepared and equipped to love others sacrificially. If the love of God compels you--or motivates you (2 Cor 5:14), then you'll do a better job of loving others.

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