Getting at what Jesus means can be difficult when we’re distracted by what he says. Yes, he is still about the love.
Why Jesus is still talking about love
Proper 18C | Luke 14:25-33
Let’s get this out of the way.
Does Jesus want you to hate: your parents, family, and life itself?
Short answer: no.
Slightly longer answer: depends on how one defines hate.
Long answer: Yes, but it’s the opposite of what you’re thinking.
In other words: it’s complicated. But only because of how we see it.
This is where part of the Body of Christ starts hyperventilating because words are words. And if we don’t believe Jesus’s words here, then we don’t believe them anywhere.
And while most of us can see that response as its own kind of a cop out, it is a sincere and genuinely important part of the greater conversation.
It also means that when we talk about what Jesus is saying, what Jesus means by what he is saying, and what we are supposed to do about what Jesus means by what he is saying, we have long ago left behind: “because he said it.” That’s a whole other conversation.
Because what we have here, today, are words from Jesus that only make sense if we ignore what Jesus teaches or they do make sense if we figure out what he actually means.
Hate
The main problem for us is the word: hate. Because it really only means one thing to us. Hate isn’t a squishy word with a lot of uses. In our usage, it means only what we think it means. To despise. That’s it.
So let’s pretend I said to you that I hated the movie Congo. [I really had to dig for this one.] The meaning of how I feel toward the movie is clear. And everyone would at least recognize that I’m entitled to that.
But everyone would also start wondering why. What about that movie sparked that intensity.
The script was terrible. The dialogue was ridiculous. And the pacing of the rising action was truly un-believable. It was one of only two movies I’ve ever regretted not walking out of. In short: it was badly made.
A slightly different example is City of Angels, which I’ve mentioned before. I liked the movie, but hated what it said about free will.
Hate has more nuance than we think.
And because we treat hate as the opposite of love, hate becomes narrow in our minds. Specific. And as people of love, we think we aren’t supposed to hate.
But that isn’t what it means.
It really means a lot of things.
Jesus hates evil. He also hates oppression, demons, debt, when religious elites pretend like they care but really don’t.
Jesus can be full of love and also hate the things that imperil love.
So what is the nuance in Jesus’s command?
He commands that we hate in order to be disciples. Hating parents, families, even life itself.
We know that obviously this isn’t the entirety of his teaching. Our job isn’t to hate our families just because. It would be hard to square this teaching with “love one another.”
What is the reason he is encouraging this hate?
Something we can do is to think about other times Jesus has spoken about family, division, and driving a wedge between ourselves and our families. And what is the context of that? When his own mother and siblings try to stop him from proclaiming the gospel.
He isn’t wishing ill will toward his family. But he’s saying that they are impeding the Kin-dom. So they are serving the wrong team.
We can also gain context from what else Jesus is saying here.
To be a disciple, one must also give up all possessions.
If you’ve ever decluttered your home or read a book by Marie Kondo, Peter Walsh, or Joshua Becker, you know that a huge part of the game is mindset.
KonMari
People like to mock Marie Kondo’s approach to decluttering; mostly because we want to avoid hearing what she is telling us about ourselves. She invites her students to physically touch each item in the home and determine if it “sparks joy.”
The very practical lesson in it is simple: do you actually like this thing? And if your response is anything else, then get rid of it.
Kondo’s approach, called KonMari, is heavily influenced by Shinto. So we don’t merely dispose of things. What we are doing is changing a relationship. So we thank them for their service to us. And we say goodbye to them as we let them go.
Our post-enlightenment Western minds scoff at such an idea. Call it stupid. Meanwhile our homes fill up with junk we don’t need, don’t even really like, and tell ourselves we might use it, so we keep it “just in case.”
Love it or Leave it
Similar ideas are found in other minimalist approaches. They encourage us to keep only what we love. But they also offer us ways to detach from stuff that we no longer love. Often by helping us see that we don’t actually love these things anymore.
One of the most common approaches is to mess with your environment to account for what you actually use. Tricks include putting all of your things in boxes and taking things out only when you need them. Then we can put it away where it goes. Because clearly we use this item. What’s left in the boxes we probably don’t need.
The same goes for closets. So if summer went by and you never wore that pair of shorts, no matter what you actually think about them, you didn’t love them enough to wear them.
Remembering Hate and Attachment
None of these decluttering experts tell you to sell all of your possessions or hate life itself. But they invite a vision of decluttering that we might call ruthless. Just because they don’t say to hate our things, they teach us to say goodbye to them and literally throw them in the trash. To no longer worry about them.
These teachings really do quite mirror Jesus’s around our decommitting to our possessions, relinquishing control over them, and making our principle commitment to God’s plan of a blessed community of love.
One of our favorite words in religious and spirituality circles is to talk about attachments. So there are things we are attached to that are bad for us. We must let them go.
But we also must be willing to let good attachments go, too. Because sometimes they aren’t serving our community well. We sacrifice good things for the sake of our health.
Neither of these is terribly easy on us. But they also are necessary. This is why the idea is so familiar: of getting rid of possessions so they can stop possessing us.
The Bigger Picture
So when we include other teachings of Jesus’s on family and possession, the idea of what Jesus means by hating family sounds vastly different.
It isn’t a prescription to go out and hate.
It’s a command for all of us to reorder our priorities. Committing to a life of love and compassion first. Not one controlled by parents who want something different from you, family that demands you behave their way, or a world that would sooner enslave its whole population rather than look anything like the Kin-dom.
This is an invitation to freedom!
And it’s why the words strike us so strangely. Because we actually do know what Jesus means. It’s what he’s been saying the whole time. But our interpretations got in the way. Interpretations reinforced by those who want us to have more possessions. Who want us to put our family before our community. Who want to possess.
And what does that invitation look like for us now?
As our greatest common possession has a couple of broken windows? A/C units that need replacing. A sound system that needs upgrading.
Jesus’s command isn’t so prescriptive that we ought to sell it and give away the money to the poor. Mostly because the Diocese wouldn’t let us do that. But neither does it encourage us to lock this place up tight like a prison.
What Jesus commands us to do—is to be disciples. Disciples who are willing to sacrifice for the sake of Jesus’s Way of Love. Sacrifice money, influence, power, status, and even the support of family for the sake of a community governed by love. Not nastiness and spite. Fear or hate.
I think we’re called to love this community as it is. While also being a beacon of hope for the community that could yet be.
A people of love and forgiveness, joy and understanding, hope and generosity.A community that becomes ever less afraid of what is because God’s dream is awakening beneath our feet. And we are the ones here to recognize it and tend to it, so something beautiful will grow. And its fruit is for everyone.