Hating Families?

On Sunday we concluded our You Asked For It series by looking at a difficult passage. In Luke 14:26, Jesus teaches "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-yes, even his own life-he cannot be my disciple." It is not enough to just say Jesus could not mean that. There were plenty of ancient philosophers and religious teachers that believed that you needed to forsake family to achieve enlightenment. What I wanted to do, more than just tackling this passage, is to demonstrate a model for anyone to wrestle with any difficult passage. The first place to start is with Jesus' attitude elsewhere about family. If Jesus had a generally negative view of family then perhaps we need to take this at face value. Yet we find Jesus affirming the commandment to honour father and mother, and he even arranging care for his own mother while he was on the cross. Jesus had compassion on parents that brought their sick children to him. Jesus even appeared post-resurrection to his unbelieving brother James so that James could become a Christian and eventually the head of the Jerusalem church. Jesus had a generally positive attitude toward family that suggests that we must look deeper into the meaning of this verse. When we go to the parallel verse in Matthew 10:37, Jesus speaks about relative love rather than hate. Matthew is interpreting for us what Jesus meant by hate. We must not love family more than Christ. Jesus lived this before he commanded it. His family wanted him to stop what he was doing but God's will was more important than pleasing human family. The miracle is that our secondary love for families with God's power is greater than our primary love for family in our own strength. We are not to hate our families but love them after we have given our primary love and obedience to Christ.