Not Alone
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” — Luke 14:26
Talk about cognitive dissonance. The Christian faith is about following Jesus, who we believe to be the Son of God, sent to the world for the sake of love. Our most foundational teaching is that “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…” (John 3:16). No wonder it is so hard for us to reconcile Jesus with words about hating ourselves and our closest family members.
I have read different explanations for what Jesus must have actually meant. Most of the authors seem to believe that Jesus’s words have something to do with being willing to give up everything to follow Him and/or the fact that following Him might jeopardize our closest family and friend relationships. I am skeptical of these interpretations at this point in my faith journey.
Whenever I have witnessed or experienced harm inflicted by the church, it is nearly always traced back to a place of woundedness in the person who is inflicting the harm. It seems to me that a traditional interpretation of Jesus’s words is at least partly responsible. We read Scripture about hating our life and assume that feeling miserable is a natural part of being a Christian. We overextend ourselves—draining our physical and emotional resources to a dangerous level—somehow believing that we are supposed to meet every need regardless of the personal cost. And we become so focused on Jesus’s command to love our neighbor that we neglect the people closest to us, which is the very definition of neighbor.
Recently, I came across an explanation of Jesus’s words that makes more sense to me. In her book, Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor proposes the possibility that Jesus might have made such a challenging statement to the crowds because He actually wanted them to turn back: “[Jesus} did not need people to go to Jerusalem to die with him. He needed people to go back where they came from and live the kinds of lives that he had risked his own life to show them: lives of resisting the powers of death, of standing up for the little and the least, of turning cheeks and washing feet, of praying for enemies and loving the unlovable. That would be plenty hard enough for most of them.”
Imagine what our world would look like if Christians believed they were supposed to stay right where they are, loving the people God has placed closest in their lives. Imagine the impact of a people committed to staying—with spouses and children, neighbors, co-workers, and extended families—making little choices to love whenever they can.
