On Christ's teaching about hating our mother and father for his sake

Another difficult saying of Christ’s (Luke 14:26-27)

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

And whosoever doth (does) not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.      Luke 14:26-27

Years ago I came across a small book explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity. I bought the book and attempted to read it, but it wasn’t long before I was bewildered by scientific complexities that were completely over my head.

An illustration in the opening pages of the book had something to do with dropping a ball out of a window of a train carriage. If the ball were dropped from the window of a stationary carriage it would fall in a straight line. If, however, it were dropped from the window of a moving train while the train was going over a bridge (to allow for a longer flight path), the ball would fall in an arc – although it would seem to be falling in a straight line to someone observing it from the moving train.

What this had to do with energy, mass and the speed of light I had no idea – but I recognized that the problem was my ignorance, and knew that the illustration would make more sense to someone who had a greater knowledge of such subjects.

When it comes to the words of Jesus Christ mentioned above, I recently saw them referred to in an atheist critique of Christianity. “What kind of a teaching is this?”, the author wanted to know – but the teachings of Christ are much farther over an atheist’s head than the explanations of Einstein’s theory were over mine. After all, Einstein was operating within the realm of merely human knowledge – at the farther frontiers of that knowledge, of course, but still within the same realm. As such, his theory is accessible to anyone who has had sufficient training in math and physics.

The teachings of Christ, however, go far beyond ordinary scientific knowledge – so much so that they are inaccessible to all except those who can perceive by faith. As we read in John chapter 1, speaking of Christ, it says that “the light shineth (shines) in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

And what is this darkness, this intellectual, psychological and spiritual barrier that prevents people from understanding the teachings of Jesus Christ? It is not ignorance, or stupidity, or lack of culture. Neither is it a lack of will (as I lacked the knowledge and the will to properly study an explanation of Einstein’s theory). It is rather the darkness of sin that has blinded the hearts and minds of the entire human race since the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (for a few comments on the historicity of the creation story in Genesis see [1] at the end of this essay).

Because of this fall from spiritual perfection, there is a spiritual darkness which universally permeates all of human nature. As we read in Ephesians chapter 4, people who are estranged from God are described as “having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.”

Thus we cannot understand Christ and the things of Christ without the eye of faith. This is not belief in things for which we haver no evidence. We read in Hebrews 11 that faith “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This means among other things that itself is evidence of those unseen spiritual realms where our origins and our true happiness lie. Faith is the ability to perceive the unseen, immaterial realities of God that go far above and beyond the ordinary material knowledge of the physical world.

However, when we seek to understand the teachings of Christ through the eye and the reasoning of faith – and faith, too, has its logic, its inferences and its conclusions – we quickly find that some of those teachings are difficult to understand (and others are easy to understand but hard to do). For example, Christ said at one point, “I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” This was a difficult saying for people to accept, and many of his disciples turned away from him because of it (John 6:60, 66).

The religious leaders were also confused when Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” They understood him to mean the physical temple where the conversation took place, but he was referring to his physical death and resurrection (the human body is referred to as a temple in I Corinthians 3:16).

So, biblical teachings are not always easy – and not only atheists have wondered about Christ’s injunction to hate our parents, wives, children and siblings. People who believe in Christ and in the Bible have wondered about this verse also.

The Bible teaches that we should honor our parents (Exodus 20) – and this is not one of the ceremonial or dietary laws of the Torah that are explicitly set aside in the New Testament. Christ himself reaffirmed the commandment to honor our parents in Matthew 5:14 – so how can we then hate them at the same time?

A common explanation among Evangelicals today is to say that we should love our parents, but that our love for God should be so much greater that our love for our parents will seem like hatred by comparison. This seems to me to be a shallow and feeble explanation that does not confront the difficulty of the text, and so misses its deepest and most necessary truths.

For one thing, the same Greek word used for “hate” here - μισέω – is also used in other passages that clearly mean “hate” in the common and ordinary sense of the world. For example, we find  μισέω also used in such passages as:

• If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. (John 15:18)

• Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you. (I John 3:13)

• But this thou hast (you have), that thou hatest (you hate) the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. (Revelation 2:6)

• And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake . . . (Matthew 10:22)

All of these verses use some form of the same basic verb used by Luke to mean “hate.” True, any word can be used in different ways. We might say that we hate different things with varying degrees of intensity, and I think it is obvious that we are not supposed to hate our parents, spouses and siblings in the same way that the world hates Christ. I only want to suggest that understanding “hate” to really mean only a lesser form of love does not seem reasonable.

But what other interpretation might there be? First, looking at the entire verse, we find that we are supposed to hate our own lives also – and I don’t think anyone ever suggested that this means we should love ourselves and our own lives, yet at the same time love God so much more that our self-love will seem like hate by comparison.

Let us focus on this last part of the verse first. If we can understand in what sense we must hate our own lives, then it will be easier to understand what it means to hate parts of those same lives.

To begin, let’s look at Matthew 10:38-39: “And he that taketh (takes) not his cross, and followeth (follows) after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth (finds) his life shall lose it: and he that loseth (loses) his life for my sake shall find it.”

What does this mean, finding one’s life but losing it, or losing one’s life but finding it? I think we can say that the man who finds his life but in the end loses it is the self-sufficient man walking according to the natural light and wisdom of the world. He knows of himself what he wants to do and works diligently to accomplish his aims. He knows what he likes, and what he dislikes, what is important to him and what is not, and what things are good or bad for him and what are not.

Even though he may go far and accomplish great things, his life will be lost to him in two senses or on two levels. [A] He will have squandered his entire life on himself and for himself and missed his real fulfilment in this life; and [B] his soul will finally be lost when he stands before God on the day of judgment. All of his virtues and merits – which may be considerable – will be insufficient relative to God’s infinite standards of perfection, and he will be sent into the outer darkness to spend eternity in separation from the God whom he denied in this life.

The man who loses his life for Christ’s sake can be described as the man who, by God’s help and spiritual enlightenment, comes to an understanding of who Christ is, the Son of Man, the only-begotten Son of God, who has come into the world to deliver us from our sins, and show us the way to eternal life. With Christ as his goal, Christ the door that opens into eternal life, he can lay aside his own will, his earthly ambitions, plans, and desires, finding all of them sinful and vain relative to the holiness of God in Christ. Then, again and always with God’s help, he can so live and so believe as to find [A] true inner fulfilment in this life, and [B] God’s acceptance through Christ in the next.

But what is Christ talking about in verse 38, where it says it is necessary for us to take up our cross, or we are not worthy of him? Is this adding works to salvation by faith? Don’t we just believe in Christ and go to heaven? And what does it mean to be worthy of Christ? Which of us can ever be considered worthy?

It says in Revelation 3:4 that a few of the believers in the city of Sardis “shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.” And we also read of the church, the bride of Christ, that “she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.” (Revelation 19:8).

This is not the worthiness of natural human merit. It is the perfect worthiness of Christ of which we are partakers by faith – but this brings with it a cross. The cross that we must bear is the inherent contradiction between Christ and the sinful world, and between Christ and our own ignorant, sinful and foolish natures. Thus, to sincerely try to follow Christ in faith is to come into conflict, both with the world, and with ourselves – even it may be, with some of our most cherished desires, or most deeply rooted weaknesses, bad attitudes and sins.

As to those who want to have a Christianity without the cross, thinking that they can live for themselves in this world without any deeper commitment, they need to have a care lest they find out at the end that they never really knew Christ at all.

From these two verses in Matthew – and from many others – we can learn that to believe in Christ is to live for Christ also - for “the just shall live by faith.” To live for Christ is necessarily and inevitably to come into conflict with the world and with ourselves (still bearing as we do traces of the old man, the world and the flesh).

There is conflict with the world – for Christ has said:

If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.

If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

There is conflict with the self – for we read in Romans,

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth (dwells) no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

With this in mind, we can now go back to the passage in Luke. First of all, we notice the same reference to the cross. Is Christ adding something to salvation by faith here? No, he is explaining a significant part of what living by faith means. This is elaborated on in the book of Hebrews. In chapter 11 we read that through faith we understand God’s creation of the world. We read that through faith Noah prepared, and Abraham sojourned; Sarah received strength to conceive, and Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. Many other saints worked, and obtained, and escaped; were made strong and grew valiant; suffered torture, mockings and imprisonment; were stoned, afflicted, tempted and destitute – for saving faith is a living, working active thing. “For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living,” and “faith without works is dead.”

And now we come to the key question about hating one’s parents. Once again, we read here that we must hate our own lives, which we can begin to do once we truly have even some faint inkling of who Jesus Christ is and what he represents. Relative to his holiness we are dust and ashes – and all of our hurts, dreams, earthly loves, likes or dislikes, ambitions, hopes, fears – all of them we can gladly cast away (perhaps after some preliminary struggle) in that essential self-denial which is a prerequisite for resurrection into newness of life.

This does not involve a lifetime of cringing, whining, moaning before God, begging him not to forget us, endlessly confessing our faults, pleading for forgiveness which has in fact already been granted. On the contrary, it is a necessary step to that true deliverance from self which so many in the world seek in vain to find by other means. It is part of that escape from the dungeons of our petty and miserable selves which leads to true spiritual freedom, and a confidence of God’s acceptance of us through our participation by faith in the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, at last, specifically about our parents, which was the initial purpose of this essay . . .

Parents are among our greatest obstacles to achieving that dying to self that is so essential to our true inner fulfilment. Whether good parents or bad, their influence on us is so great, as to become a real barrier to our full spiritual development. This is true whether or not our parents were good to us or not.

Maybe our parents were bad to us. Maybe they abandoned us so that in all of our formative years we were deprived of their love and guidance. They may have been hostile, abusive, angry; or, they may have been nice enough in a way, but treated us with a casual indifference and lack of real communication which can also be deeply hurtful to a child. Lack of real parental love and concern can leave people scarred and crippled for life. We try to escape from these things and grow out of them but many cannot. We cannot be like Baron von Munchausen in the fictional narrative who was trapped and sinking in a bog, but rescued himself by taking a hold of the hair on his head and lifting himself out.

And what if we had good parents, great parents, kind and loving parents who gave us just the right amounts of guidance, love, discipline, encouragement and correction? What if we thus entered our young adulthoods with self-confidence and creativity, positive social skills and a sound character and mind (according to the world’s standards)? Those things too can be barriers, or turn into barriers, that keep us from Christ.

If everything is going well for us in the world, and we have good jobs and nice families, and interesting lives, and seemingly firm foundations based on our own optimism and self-confidence – all of that must be broken down also.

Thus, no matter whether it was good or bad, the influence of our parents extends so deeply into every nook and cranny of our minds and souls, that we need to break free of them if we are to truly be the individuals God intended us to be. Hence, these closest ties need to be severed, so that we can really understand and love and deal with our parents as we ought. This severance is not easy, and requires a sharp repudiation on the deepest level, so that we may more fully find our own selves at last.

This sharp repudiation in response to the demands and the call of Christ is difficult, and requires an intensity that can be called hatred – but it is like the pains of a woman in childbirth. It does not persist for a lifetime, but is a short precursor to new life – and we can arise from it to see our parents from a new perspective. Now we can deal with them on a basis of real maturity and independence. We can maintain a proper distance, and at the same time be grateful to God for all of his goodness that we received through them. We can also, if need be, truly forgive them from our hearts more easily for the hurt and pain they inflicted on us (maybe even inflicted unknowingly).

It also becomes easier to overcome the bad effects of mal-parenting, since we now begin to recognize in Christ how much more we are than mere creatures of prior conditioning. And, of course, the same applies to the other family members mentioned in the verse – for by breaking free of them in our spirits, we can also strengthen and deepen our relationships in the long run.

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[1] Concerning the fall into sin of Adam and Eve and the historicity of the creation account in Genesis, those are essential to the Christian metaphysic and to the Christian faith. They are in no sense contrary to science, because scientific knowledge does not extend to the miraculous works of God that far transcend mere science and are not constrained by any scientific laws.

The creation of the world has never been observed in the laboratory or recreated in any experiment. It, and the emergence of the first human beings, are beyond the realm, reach and range of science which – as science, qua science – has nothing to say about these matters. Scientific laws only apply to the natural world subsequent to its miraculous creation out of nothing by the word of God alone.

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3). And all of the scientists in the world have not a particle of evidence to refute this.