“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his
father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own
life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).
Despite what
it may look like, Jesus is not telling His disciples to hate their families; to
understand Jesus’ words this way would be to read them out of context, and to
misrepresent what Jesus is trying to teach. It would be odd and inconsistent
for Jesus to say here that, in order to be His disciple one must forsake house
and home, wife and child, land and animals, and even body and life. This is
what the Pharisees did, or at least what they appeared to do; Jesus rebukes
them for it. They forsook their families, denying care to their own parents in
order to devote the money they would’ve otherwise spent for that purpose as a
gift to God. How pious! That type of denial and sacrifice seems to be what
Jesus is calling for here, but it is not. He rebukes the Pharisees for “making
the word of God of no effect through your tradition which you have handed
down.”[1]
The Word of God says that we are to honor father and mother. The Pharisees were
not doing so; they were breaking God’s command by not caring for their parents,
even though they took the money they would have used to care for them and
diverted it for “holy” purposes. It isn’t a good work to give a monetary gift
to God, if in doing so we break His command. Rather, we should give the gift,
and at the same time fear and love God, so that we may not despise nor anger
our parents and masters, but give them honor, serve, obey, and hold them in
love and esteem.
The reformers
dealt with the same type of issue. People viewed those who took monastic vows
as a kind of “first class” Christian. Those monks were much better than the
average layman. They were doing an especially good work; they were forsaking
the world and devoting themselves to serving God. In his Smalcald Articles,
Luther answers this mindset bluntly:
He who makes a
vow to live as a monk believes that he will enter upon a way of life holier
than ordinary Christians lead. He wants to earn heaven by his own works, not
only for himself, but also for others. This is to deny Christ.[2]
So, what does
Jesus mean when He says we cannot be His disciple unless we hate our father,
mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and our own life? We know He wants
us to care for our parents; we know He doesn’t want us to make up our own
traditions to follow, which make us look holier than the average Christian for
the purpose of earning our way into the Kingdom of Heaven by our own inadequate
works. So what does He want?
Jesus wants us
to know what is ultimately important. He wants us to know that what is
ultimately important is not this body and life, our goods, fame, child, or
wife. He wants us to know that, though these things all be gone, our victory
has been won; the kingdom ours remaineth. The Kingdom of God, into which we
entered by the blood of Christ is ours – now. We who are connected to Christ,
to His death and resurrection in our baptism, have what He promises us, and it
is the most important thing ever: the forgiveness of our sins, and eternal
life, resurrected from our grave in our own perfected body, with Christ
forever, in the new and restored creation, where we will be forever free from
sin, death, and the power of the devil.
Jesus wants us
to understand what is ultimately important. Our families, our possessions, our
lives…these are all good gifts from God. But,
“He who loves
father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or
daughter more than Me is not worthy of me.”[3]
By telling us
to hate our father and mother, Jesus is pointing us back to His Law, given to
Moses:
“If your
brother, the son of your mother, your son or your daughter, the wife of your bosom,
or your friend who is as your own soul, secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us
go and serve other gods,’ which you have not known, neither you nor your
fathers, of the gods of the people which are all around you, near to you or far
off from you, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth, you
shall not consent to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor
shall you spare him or conceal him; but you shall surely kill him; your hand
shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all
the people.”[4]
God and His
Word is the most important thing. God’s Word is the means by which He converts
us, forgives us, and makes us alive in Christ, who is the Word incarnate. Here
God tells the people that He is more important to them than the bonds of
friendship or family, so much so that even if our family members try to lead us
astray from the faith, we should choose Christ over them. Thankfully, since we
no longer live in the theocratic nation of Old Testament Israel, like Moses and
the Israelites, we are no longer bound by the civil law of that country, and we
are therefore not obligated to put our heretic relatives to death. The
obligation of the moral law, however, does remain binding: You shall have no
other gods. What does this mean? We should fear, and love, and trust in God
above all things. This is what Jesus means when, explaining that He has not
come to bring peace, but a sword, says,
“For I have
come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’; and ‘a man’s enemies will be those
of his own household.’”[5]
This is why He
tells us not to fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul – our
enemies in this world, who hate the Gospel and seek to tear down Christ’s
Church. Instead, Jesus says we should fear Him who is able to destroy both soul
and body in hell – God. The unbelieving world may be able to persecute us. They may be able to mistreat us, and steal our property,
and even murder us. Christ says, so be it. Those things, good as they may be,
are not ultimately important. If you think they are and are not willing to let
them go, you have already received your reward. In Christ, the kingdom ours
remaineth. They can’t take away from us what God the Father has promised us in
Christ, that which is of ultimate importance – the forgiveness of sins, and our
life everlasting. Because He lives, we shall live.
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