Having to Hate??
Proper 18C
Luke 14.25-33
Would to God that he had lost his papers the day he wrote this down! “If you don’t hate your father, your mother, your husband, your children, your sister, your brother, you can’t be my disciple.” We need this teaching like a hole in the head. Why did Luke write such a thing down? What can he have been thinking about?
Perhaps he got it wrong. Perhaps Luke misunderstood. It’s easy to misunderstand someone of a different nationality, using a different language. Anyway he was writing it down years later. That’ll be it. It’s got warped, distorted over time. We can comfort ourselves with such a possibility. But it’s no use. If Luke got it wrong, so did Matthew,
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. (Matt 10.37)
And again,
I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother. (Matt 10.35)
There is no wriggling out of it. There is a ring of authenticity in these terrible words.
In the 1950s, the then famous Archbishop of Cape Town, Joost de Blank, wrote a little book called “Uncomfortable Words.” [see also script for Proper 15C on this website] In it he said, Anglicans brought up on the old Prayer Book Communion service were very familiar with the “comfortable words” of Christ - Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh, and the others, but that we also need to hear his uncomfortable words, 'that we may be shaken out of our complacency and yield our lives more completely in [Christ’s] service.'
Can I really take that, applied to these words, half-a-century and more further on? When de Blank was writing, the family in our society was stronger, perhaps, than it had ever been. The dire poverty that had destroyed so many families in earlier days was largely a thing of the past, and the social values of family belonging held sway, didn’t they? But now, the
last thing we need are words that chop into even more tatters what is already tattered enough. Isn’t the family dying, and aren’t we all the worst for that?
I don’t need to rehearse the statistics, do I? We all know that the divorce rate has more than doubled in less than 25
years. That about a quarter of children can expect their parents to divorce before they are 16 years of age. That a fifth of all dependent children live in lone parent families. And on and on.
Don’t get me wrong. None of this is meant to malign divorced people. I only use those figures as examples of which we are all very aware. There are plenty of other things that divide families. Do I have to refer to disagreements about money and lifestyle and priorities and how issues should be handled, that break people apart. Is there one of us here that hasn’t got some dispute like that lurking in our family somewhere. People who haven’t spoken for years and years, maybe.
Or even family members that have worked to do each other down. These are all too ordinary things, without going on to the extremes of abusive behaviour to the young, the elderly, or the partner. There is so much that divides families - who needs Jesus adding to the pain?
This is indeed painful stuff. Family hurt is about as painful as it gets. According to Barbara Brown Taylor, 'No one knows how to hurt each other the way family members do. The knowledge of one another is so great, the shared history so powerful, the memories so deep - all of them heavy weapons in the arsenals we use against one another.'[i] She is
exactly right - we all know it. Statistically, we are far more likely to be murdered by someone in our own family circle than by a stranger. The river of emotion and pain runs very deeply in families.
Acknowledging that is the place to begin in understanding these strange words from Jesus. Rejection, hurt, dispute, trouble in your family touches any one of us at such a level that it becomes all consuming. It is such a major
thing in our life experience that it becomes enmeshed in the way we see ourselves, the way we see life, the way reality is for us. Again I’m only voicing something we all know - rejection by a parent can mark an individual for life; the intense jealousies of brother and sister, if handled wrongly, can stamp an indelible mark on a person’s personality so that every relationship in an individual’s life is coloured by it; when love in a family relationship turns to hate, the hate produced has a fierceness to it that is found nowhere else. These things are all consuming - cul de sacs from which there is no escape. No, says Jesus, believe me, there can be another way. But we can’t hear it, we can’t believe that lives don’t run into dead ends from which there is no way out.
The ideal family as an idea exerts so much pressure on us all. There is so much guilt floating around. Other people’s families seem perfect. It is so hard to cope with the hurtful things in mine. Things don’t work for us like they do for other people. Get real, says Jesus. That’s the point of the startling language. Jesus is using the device of exaggeration to make us hear. 'If you don’t hate your father, your mother, your husband, your children, your sister, your brother, you can’t be my disciple.' It isn’t that we are being required to cultivate hatred towards our nearest and dearest. No, rather we
are being told that in the light of following Jesus everything else is relativized.
Nothing and no one can compete with the demands of following Jesus. This is good news. It means that what defines us first and foremost is our relationship to Jesus - not our relationship to our father, or our mother, or our sister, or our brother, or our spouse. All these relationships are of a second order. Whatever problems, troubles and torments that stem from those relationships, they are not the be all and end all of what we are as people.
Jesus knew allabout the power of families in our lives. He knew well the great good a family may achieve for its members, and the great anxieties too. He knew how productive the security of family life can be, and he knew how marring and
debilitating it can be also. He knew how easy it is to be so consumed by our family experience that we forget who we are apart from those family experiences.
Yes, I am son, grandson, nephew, husband, father and uncle. I am all of those roles, and all of those roles have shaped who I am. But I am not defined by those roles. I am Christopher, a child of God - that is my primary identity, all other identities grow out of it. True peace and absolute security lies in that identity as a child of God. When I know that with my head and my heart, all that life brings me, ill as well as good, is put in a different place. No longer do these other things determine who I am, or what I may do, or how I feel about living. That are relativized in the light of a God who loves me unconditionally, absolutely, and unendingly. Nothing but nothing can take that away from the me that I am.
The faithfulness of God to me changes everything.
To belong is everything. When we know who’s were are, then we can have confidence in who we are. Whatever our human relationships, we belong to God first and foremost. That’s who we are. I like the translation of one of the beatitudes that puts it like this,
“You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are - no more, no less.
That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.”[ii]
That’s what makes the cost of discipleship life’s greatest bargain. Thanks be to God.
[i] God in Pain, 1998, Nashville: Abingdon Press.
[ii] Eugene Peterson, 1996, Living the Message, London: HarperCollins.
Perhaps he got it wrong. Perhaps Luke misunderstood. It’s easy to misunderstand someone of a different nationality, using a different language. Anyway he was writing it down years later. That’ll be it. It’s got warped, distorted over time. We can comfort ourselves with such a possibility. But it’s no use. If Luke got it wrong, so did Matthew,
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. (Matt 10.37)
And again,
I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother. (Matt 10.35)
There is no wriggling out of it. There is a ring of authenticity in these terrible words.
In the 1950s, the then famous Archbishop of Cape Town, Joost de Blank, wrote a little book called “Uncomfortable Words.” [see also script for Proper 15C on this website] In it he said, Anglicans brought up on the old Prayer Book Communion service were very familiar with the “comfortable words” of Christ - Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh, and the others, but that we also need to hear his uncomfortable words, 'that we may be shaken out of our complacency and yield our lives more completely in [Christ’s] service.'
Can I really take that, applied to these words, half-a-century and more further on? When de Blank was writing, the family in our society was stronger, perhaps, than it had ever been. The dire poverty that had destroyed so many families in earlier days was largely a thing of the past, and the social values of family belonging held sway, didn’t they? But now, the
last thing we need are words that chop into even more tatters what is already tattered enough. Isn’t the family dying, and aren’t we all the worst for that?
I don’t need to rehearse the statistics, do I? We all know that the divorce rate has more than doubled in less than 25
years. That about a quarter of children can expect their parents to divorce before they are 16 years of age. That a fifth of all dependent children live in lone parent families. And on and on.
Don’t get me wrong. None of this is meant to malign divorced people. I only use those figures as examples of which we are all very aware. There are plenty of other things that divide families. Do I have to refer to disagreements about money and lifestyle and priorities and how issues should be handled, that break people apart. Is there one of us here that hasn’t got some dispute like that lurking in our family somewhere. People who haven’t spoken for years and years, maybe.
Or even family members that have worked to do each other down. These are all too ordinary things, without going on to the extremes of abusive behaviour to the young, the elderly, or the partner. There is so much that divides families - who needs Jesus adding to the pain?
This is indeed painful stuff. Family hurt is about as painful as it gets. According to Barbara Brown Taylor, 'No one knows how to hurt each other the way family members do. The knowledge of one another is so great, the shared history so powerful, the memories so deep - all of them heavy weapons in the arsenals we use against one another.'[i] She is
exactly right - we all know it. Statistically, we are far more likely to be murdered by someone in our own family circle than by a stranger. The river of emotion and pain runs very deeply in families.
Acknowledging that is the place to begin in understanding these strange words from Jesus. Rejection, hurt, dispute, trouble in your family touches any one of us at such a level that it becomes all consuming. It is such a major
thing in our life experience that it becomes enmeshed in the way we see ourselves, the way we see life, the way reality is for us. Again I’m only voicing something we all know - rejection by a parent can mark an individual for life; the intense jealousies of brother and sister, if handled wrongly, can stamp an indelible mark on a person’s personality so that every relationship in an individual’s life is coloured by it; when love in a family relationship turns to hate, the hate produced has a fierceness to it that is found nowhere else. These things are all consuming - cul de sacs from which there is no escape. No, says Jesus, believe me, there can be another way. But we can’t hear it, we can’t believe that lives don’t run into dead ends from which there is no way out.
The ideal family as an idea exerts so much pressure on us all. There is so much guilt floating around. Other people’s families seem perfect. It is so hard to cope with the hurtful things in mine. Things don’t work for us like they do for other people. Get real, says Jesus. That’s the point of the startling language. Jesus is using the device of exaggeration to make us hear. 'If you don’t hate your father, your mother, your husband, your children, your sister, your brother, you can’t be my disciple.' It isn’t that we are being required to cultivate hatred towards our nearest and dearest. No, rather we
are being told that in the light of following Jesus everything else is relativized.
Nothing and no one can compete with the demands of following Jesus. This is good news. It means that what defines us first and foremost is our relationship to Jesus - not our relationship to our father, or our mother, or our sister, or our brother, or our spouse. All these relationships are of a second order. Whatever problems, troubles and torments that stem from those relationships, they are not the be all and end all of what we are as people.
Jesus knew allabout the power of families in our lives. He knew well the great good a family may achieve for its members, and the great anxieties too. He knew how productive the security of family life can be, and he knew how marring and
debilitating it can be also. He knew how easy it is to be so consumed by our family experience that we forget who we are apart from those family experiences.
Yes, I am son, grandson, nephew, husband, father and uncle. I am all of those roles, and all of those roles have shaped who I am. But I am not defined by those roles. I am Christopher, a child of God - that is my primary identity, all other identities grow out of it. True peace and absolute security lies in that identity as a child of God. When I know that with my head and my heart, all that life brings me, ill as well as good, is put in a different place. No longer do these other things determine who I am, or what I may do, or how I feel about living. That are relativized in the light of a God who loves me unconditionally, absolutely, and unendingly. Nothing but nothing can take that away from the me that I am.
The faithfulness of God to me changes everything.
To belong is everything. When we know who’s were are, then we can have confidence in who we are. Whatever our human relationships, we belong to God first and foremost. That’s who we are. I like the translation of one of the beatitudes that puts it like this,
“You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are - no more, no less.
That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.”[ii]
That’s what makes the cost of discipleship life’s greatest bargain. Thanks be to God.
[i] God in Pain, 1998, Nashville: Abingdon Press.
[ii] Eugene Peterson, 1996, Living the Message, London: HarperCollins.