Luke 14:25-33
Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Okay, just so you know where we’re going with this one today, I have to warn you that this is not an easy verse to take. There is no magic trick or brilliant new translation of the original Greek that’s going to make the difficulty of what Jesus is saying go away. Jesus really means it. If you want to be his disciple, you have to turn your back on your family, your friends, and everything you hold dear, including your own life.
Now, Jesus doesn’t mean ‘hate’ the way we usually use the word. ‘Hate,’ the way we use it, means wishing, with violent intention, that something didn’t exist anymore. Hate is a “bad word” in our house. It’s about wanting to annihilate something or someone. And that’s not what Jesus means. In the case of this verse, ‘hate’ has connections with loyalty, which is highly valued in Middle Eastern culture. ‘Hate’ is kind of the opposite of loyal, not in the sense of treason, but in the sense that since we can only be truly loyal to one thing, we have to give up making anything else our first or ultimate loyalty, we must ‘hate’ it. Jesus is saying that if you want to be his disciple, if you want to be truly loyal to Jesus, then you have to give up your loyalty to everything else. In a way, when Jesus says we must ‘hate’ our family and friends and even our life, he’s saying that these things must be dead to us. They can no longer factor into our decision-making; they can no longer be significant enough to us to cause us to base our decisions on them. There can only be one allegiance, or one master, and if it’s going to be Jesus, then it can’t be anyone else.
That’s what it means to be a disciple, right? It means to pick one path to walk, one person to follow, and then to stick to it. Not to be swayed by other paths or other people, but to persevere and focus and do exactly what Jesus does, if that’s whose disciple we are, which of course is why we’re here. And the point of all of this, being someone’s disciple, is that by doing these things we will become just like the person we’re following. We will be transformed. We will become like Christ.
Which is why when we choose to be someone’s disciple, it can only be to that one person. Because we can only be like one person. We can’t be a little bit like Jesus and a little bit like our father, because then we wouldn’t be fully transformed. We would be only partially transformed, which isn’t any kind of transformation at all. Being a disciple of Jesus means that we can’t also be a disciple of our father or our mother, or our family, or our friends. Which is why Jesus says we have to ‘hate’ them. We have to turn our back on them as we turn towards Jesus. We have to let go of them.
Which is hard! Who wants to let go of our closest relationships? Who wants to turn our back on our family? Who wants to think of them as dead? We need our relationships to give us strength, right? And yet. And yet Dietrich Bonhoeffer, our great German martyr, said this about discipleship: “Each is called alone. Each must follow alone. Out of fear of such aloneness, a human being seeks safety in the people and things around them. Individuals suddenly discover all their responsibilities and cling to them ... [But] Christ intends to make the human being lonely. As individuals they should see nothing except him who called them.” [Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer] We cling to our relationships, calling them our responsibilities, and yet Jesus is calling us to say goodbye to them, to treat them as dead, to walk on without them.
Imagine that. Imagine if Jesus came to you, and said, “If you do not hate your parents, if you do not hate your children, if you do not hate your friends, if you do not hate the people in this congregation, you cannot be my disciple.” It’s this last one that hits home this morning. If you do not hate your brothers and sisters in this congregation, you cannot be a disciple of Christ. It’s almost ridiculous––if you do not turn your back on those sitting next to you, and in front of you and behind you, if you do not abandon your loyalty to those whose hands you shook in the vestibule this morning, if you do not consider dead to you those whom you go to the rail with to share Communion, you cannot be a disciple of Christ. And yet, that’s what Jesus is saying. In order to follow him, we must abandon our loyalty to one another and to this congregation. This is the cross Jesus calls us to carry.
So why? Why would we do this? Why have Christians throughout the centuries done this? Why did Dietrich Bonhoeffer ‘hate’ his parents and his fiancee and his friends in order to follow Christ into prison and to execution by the Nazis?
We do it because of what I said earlier––that being a disciple means we will be transformed. When Jesus said carry your cross, we know what ‘cross’ means. It means death, yes, but it also means resurrection life after death. It’s this point that we so often forget. Resurrection life. Yes, letting go of our family, and our friends, and our congregation, and our life means death. But that’s the way we get to new life. To resurrection life. To Easter life. To life which is so much better than the best we know now. Think about the most amazing memories you have of your family, or your friends, or here with people in this congregation. Who would want to let that go? But now imagine having those feelings of love and fellowship and community when each one there is really, truly, perfect. I mean, we know the shortcomings and failures and weaknesses of those we love, we know the ways they can hurt us without meaning to, and the ways we protect the most vulnerable parts of ourselves so they can’t. But imagine a time when those shortcomings and failures and weaknesses have all been healed––a time when we no longer hurt one another, when we just are, all the time, those wonderful people that God has made us to be––completely saints. That is resurrection life. Resurrection life is living completely open to the world because God makes us perfect. New and better relationships with those we love. No fear of hurt, no fear of betrayal, no fear of loss. This is why Jesus calls us to ‘hate’ our friends and family and life and to carry the cross. Because, as painful as it is to let go of our loyalty to them, as death-inducing as it is, it gets better. We carry the cross through Good Friday––through death––because we know Easter is waiting for us.
There’s an analogy I learned from one of my professors at seminary that I think I’ve shared before, but it’s worth sharing again. Our life before choosing discipleship is like a person in a flood, standing on top of their house, watching the waters rise and rise and rise. This is their house, one they’ve built from the ground up, and raised their children in, and gotten old in, but it’s disappearing under the water, and it’s going to take them with it. Then along comes a rescue helicopter, prepared to lift them away to safety and dry land and new life. But in order to grab hold of the ladder dangling in front of them, they have to let go of the house. They have to ‘hate’ their house, and all the memories that come with it, and their community, and even their neighbours, so that they can be carried away to a new life. They could choose to stay, and drown, and it’s a choice some people make. Or they could choose to let everything they know die and grab hold of the new life being offered.
This is the choice that’s laid before us. And it is a choice. We do not have to be disciples. We are baptized after all, our salvation is not in jeopardy. We will be with God when we die no matter what choice we make regarding discipleship in this life. But we can’t be a disciple without giving up our possessions, which includes our relationships. Just like if you want to drive to church, you can’t simultaneously walk to church, or if you want to wear brown shoes, you can’t also wear black shoes at the same time. They are mutually exclusive. We can’t be primarily loyal to Christ and primarily loyal to our family, or our friends, or even our congregation. We can’t let go and hold on. They are mutually exclusive. If we want to be disciples, we have to choose. We have to decide which we’re going to follow. We have to choose between this life, which ends in death, or resurrection life, which starts with death but ends with new life. It’s our choice––God gave us this choice from the moment of Creation––but we can’t choose both. In the end, our choice may result in having both, because God is the God of life and love and restoration, and so in choosing resurrection life we may experience that new life in the form of family and friends and a new church, but all these relationships will be new to us. They will be transformed, too.
And I don’t want to make it sound easy. Choosing to follow Christ, choosing to walk the path to resurrection life is painful and messy. It is our crucifixion. It requires ‘hating’ and turning our back on that which we have loved for so long. Sometimes the road feels endless, and when you’re in the middle of it, it can be hard to remember why you’re doing it or to see the value in following Christ. It’s tempting to want to stop and say, like Jesus in the garden, “Take this cup from me.” It’s temping to suddenly remember, as Bonhoeffer puts it, “all our responsibilities and cling to them.” To walk back to the beginning, rather than forward to the end.
But Christ asks this of us, because Christ has walked this same road. He knows how much farther we have to go, and he knows what we will receive when we have walked all the way and truly let go. We will receive resurrection life. New life. Transformed life. Better life. This is why he calls us to follow him, to be his disciple. Because this is what awaits us, and those we love, if we let them go and pick up and carry the cross, instead. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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