Proper 18, Year C
Luke 14:25-33
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
September 8, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
(The audio picks up partway through the opening verse.)
“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.” – Luke 14:26
Those of you who’ve been around this summer know my penchant for exploring words. I love to look at the breadth of their meanings and see how alternate translations can help us uproot our mental barriers, expanding our knowledge and practice of the Christian faith. Word studies like that are an important tool for pastors and preachers. You’ve also probably noticed my preference to allow difficult texts to remain difficult. I believe the Bible should challenge and provoke us, make us rethink our lives and actions and how we relate to God and the people around us, so softening a text isn’t something I like to do. The Bible is a collection of ancient writings from both a much different time than our own and a significantly different cultural context. Simplistic readings from a modern American viewpoint can easily obscure what the text is trying to say and occasionally lead to conclusions antithetical to the overall teaching of the Bible—even the opposite of what the writer of a particular passage may have intended.
But this week, my normal study practices led me into a bit of trouble.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers us three hard statements, the first of which is “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.” We Christians don’t generally think of “Jesus” and “hate” in the same context. Like the slogan says, “Hate is not a family value.” As Episcopalians, we actively follow the Way of Love[1] and tend to focus on Jesus’ other statements, like “love your enemies; do good to those who persecute you” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—all very legitimate and deeply rooted expressions of our faith. We assume that Jesus, as the image of the invisible God, is a genuinely nice guy. So Jesus telling us to “hate” anything other than sin sounds like a typo or an error in translation. “Hate” can’t mean hate, can it?
So I did some digging. The Greek word behind our translation’s usage of “hate” appears frequently in the New Testament. It contributes the “mis-” prefix to such modern English words as “misogyny” and “misanthropy.” And out of all its usage in the Bible, its range of meaning amounts to…“hate.” There’s really no variation, even when it appears in non-Biblical Greek texts of the era. So that looked like a dead end.
Then I noticed that two of the times it shows up, it’s in quotations from the Hebrew Bible. I dug even deeper, finding the original locations of those passages and looking at the Hebrew roots behind them. And there I did find some variation in meaning. However, those differences mainly ranged from “hate” to “foes” to “reject” to “enmity.” Out of more than 140 appearances, only ten times does the NRSV translate it as anything softer, like “disliked” or “unloved,” limited occurrences that, if anything, simply make our passage worse.
So there was really no way around it. As much cognitive dissonance it causes, when Jesus said, “hate,” his words actually meant “hate.”
Knowing there are much smarter people out there who have studied the Bible more thoroughly and persistently than I have, I next turned to several commentaries. Their explanations amounted to saying, “Jesus often uses hyperbole in his parables, so this is just a comparative overstatement to make a point. He’s saying that our love for our families should look like hate in comparison to our love for him.”
I have a couple problems with that line of thought. First of all, this isn’t a parable. Jesus is making a statement here. He further develops the idea with two short stories, but this troubling part is clearly a non-narrative declaratory statement. Second, it’s too easy. It’s all too modern and convenient. If Jesus is simply using hyperbole to make a point, we can brush it off, turning something that’s difficult to understand into a platitude. Worse yet, it has the potential to invalidate the rest of Jesus’ hard sayings, including “carrying the cross” and “give up all your possessions” that appear in today’s passage: we can collect them all into a neat little pile of overstated illustrations. The cry of “hyperbole” lets us off the hook, allowing us to continue smugly along the selfish and materialistic paths of our everyday world having obtained only informational knowledge instead of implementing transformational living.
So I sat down to write about how “hate” means “hate,” and even though we might not like it, we need to find a way to take Jesus’ words seriously, if not literally. I was about three pages into that sermon—and feeling pretty uncomfortable about it—when I stumbled across some new information[2] that made me delete my file and start over. While “hate” does indeed mean “hate,” we also need to consider Jesus’ cultural context, including the linguistic assumptions that went into it.
Although the New Testament is recorded in Greek, which was the most broadly known language in the Roman Empire, Jesus likely spoke Aramaic. Unlike English, which delights in both precision and subtle shades of meaning, Aramaic (all Ancient Near Eastern languages, actually) preferred stark contrasts and extremity of language. That’s why you can read passages in the Hebrew Bible about the Israelites completely wiping out a people group to the last man, woman, and child, only to have that same group somehow appear again a few chapters later. Extra-biblical texts from across the region reflect the same thinking over thousands of years, with various kings claiming to have completely eradicated all of their enemies only to mention in the very next sentence that they enslaved the supposedly non-existent survivors.
As I said, English delights in precise subtlety, in linguistic shades of gray. On the level of friendship, we have lovers, best friends, friends, Facebook friends, acquaintances, and people we’ve met but don’t really know. We have a range of words for expressing the spectrum of emotions along the love/hate continuum: adore, like, tolerate, dislike, detest, abhor, etc. It turns out that Aramaic doesn’t work like that. An Aramaic speaker had two options: love or hate. They don’t appear to have had any words for shades of “like” or “dislike.” A native speaker may have understood variation in meaning according to context, tone, and body language, but as outsiders well removed from that time and culture, especially as we’re dealing with the communicative limitations of written text alone, we can’t easily tease out any differences.
Which leaves us with a bit of a conundrum: “hate” means “hate,” but not necessarily in the way we understand “hate” to mean “hate.” And, as the commentaries said, Jesus does appear to be using hyperbole in English translation, but apparently not within the context of his own culture.
I think the difficulty for me here is overcoming my often literal Western mindset. Cultures that arose out of Northern Europe expect life to work with precision and efficiency, much like the machines and gadgets we love. When someone speaks, they may exaggerate, but we understand because we have visual and intonational cues from their presence. We tend to take the written word differently, especially when it’s devoid of any physical connection. We take it more seriously. How many times have you sent what you thought was an innocent email only to have the recipient blow up in response? What about receiving a memo that left you wondering whether or not the person was trying to be helpful or insult you? Or even recipes that call for a “pinch” or a “dash.” (How much of a teaspoon is that really?) Most of the time, we prefer literal, unambiguous meaning in our written texts.
But the Bible doesn’t work that way, and if we approach it from that vantage, we’re bound to run into serious misunderstandings. A vast majority of the Bible was based in oral tradition, being passed along in spoken form long before it was ever written down. We stand disadvantaged, having records of what was spoken, but not how it was spoken. Oral traditions tend to rely more heavily on symbolic than literal meanings. Parts of speech tend to blur into one another as nouns derive from actions and verbs can form from physical appearances. Emotion is portrayed through action. We should expect written records of those traditions to follow such conventions closely. Combining richly symbolic language with starkly contrasting vocabulary is not what we English-speakers expect to find, so it’s hard to keep our minds in that space.
Sometimes to understand what the Bible is saying, it helps to physically play out the situation. I think that’s fitting here. Say Fr. Jim and our worship leader are my family, and Beth over at the organ is Jesus. Standing between them now, I’m in a fairly neutral stance. But if Beth tells me to follow her, what happens to my relationship with Jim? Regardless of what my feelings may be, what does it look like? To follow Beth, from my viewpoint, I simply have to focus my attention, turn toward her, and walk over. I don’t necessarily consider Jim’s presence or feelings. But from the outside, you could interpret it differently. You might say that I’ve turned my back on Jim, despised or rejected him, and abandoned him. In a way, we’re both right; we just have different viewpoints. I’m focused on following, but you’re able to see the broader implications of my actions.
That seems to be what Jesus is talking about here. He’s speaking to “large crowds traveling with [him],” people who want to be his disciples. They’re on the move as he heads toward Jerusalem and the Passion Week. They’re focused on following, not looking behind or even ahead. They as individuals may emotionally love their families back home, but what does it look like to an outsider? It looks a lot like rejection or abandonment. It looks like hatred.
I think what’s going on here is that Jesus is warning his followers about the cost of their discipleship, hence the two brief stories about the tower builder and the warrior king. True discipleship is easily misunderstood. It can look problematic, even if there’s no negative intention. It might look like insanity, like giving away all your possessions and advantages. More than that, for the Christian, it looks like true and utter death. Nobody talked about “carrying the cross” as a metaphor in Jesus’ time. He wasn’t telling people to just stick it out in a difficult situation. The cross was an implement of terror and torture. Anyone carrying a cross was actively on the path to execution.
Jesus is using extremity of language here, but that’s because (a) it’s what he had and (b) the situation itself is extreme. In following Jesus we need to be ready to turn away from our families and our belongings, because that’s what it may indeed take. We need to consider both what we’re leaving behind and what is to come. To follow Jesus into resurrection, all of us will need to follow him into death. That death—to self, to family, to our safe and privileged lives—will look different for each of us.
What have you left behind to follow Jesus? What does it look like to follow him at school, at home, or at work? Parents, what might it look like for your children to follow him? Jesus isn’t trying to dissuade us from being disciples, but he is telling us to be prepared for the cost, both the appearance and the reality.
“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.”