The word that stops people in their tracks is the word hate. Jesus says, unless a person hates father and mother, wives and children, brothers and sisters, he cannot be my disciple.
Preachers pull back from it, interpreters of this passage pull back from it, and even translators try to find a way around it, translating it into English as 'preferring', or 'loving more than me'. But the Greek says hate, and it's strange, when one of the commandments says, we're to honour our father and our mother, that we hear Jesus saying, we must hate our father and our mother, if we want to think of following him. It is very strange.
Luke, of course, who in many ways is full of compassion and tenderness, and has a particular eye for human suffering and poverty, is also quite uncompromising. We find events and sayings in Luke's Gospel that we don't find anywhere else in the New Testament, many of them on the lips of Jesus, which are radical and uncompromising. It's the case in regard to riches, for example.
Luke is much clearer that riches themselves present followers of Christ with problems. And it's the same here in what he says about family relationships. There are passages in Luke's Gospel which tell us about Jesus' own relationship with his family, which seem to be along the same line as what he's saying in today's Gospel.
In Luke chapter 2, for example, the adolescent Jesus says to his parents, "how is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?" When they find him after he's been lost for three days, it sounds a bit rude, cold. In Luke chapter 8, "your brothers and your mother are outside looking for you. Who are my mother and my brothers? Those who hear the word of God and keep it." That's a moment we hear about in Matthew and Mark as well. In Luke 11 - one we hear only in Luke - the woman raising her voice says "blessed the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked. Blessed rather the one who hears the word of God and keeps it", Jesus says.
His responses in all these occasions seem a bit cold and rude, not the kind of courtesy or gratitude we would expect that a son or a brother ought to express in relation to his family. In Chapter 4 of Luke, they ask "is this not Joseph's son" when he comes back to Nazareth, back to his own people and things don't go well. There's misunderstanding, there's resentment, there's rejection, perhaps there's even hatred.
In Luke chapter 9, people he calls to follow him say, "first let me go and bury my father" - "leave the dead to bury their dead", Jesus says. Another strange saying about family relationships not taking priority over people's relationship with him. And just a few weeks ago, we heard him talking about coming to bring division, not peace, and division particularly within families.
So Jesus, it seems clear, is not simply a purveyor of middle class values, although he has often been turned into that. He's not here to endorse the world as it is understood by the crowds following him. Multitudes are still following him at this point, we're told.
But he's not here simply to endorse their world. He is strange and different. And his call is not to us to find a place for him in our world, but a call to us to follow him into his world, where he has found a place for us. Our task is not to squeeze him and his message into our world, in which case we have to interpret away, hive off, cut away things that are too strange, too difficult. That's not our job, to squeeze him and his message into our world, but to follow him into his new world.
Luke's gospel is the gospel of great reversals. Hate those you're inclined to love, he seems to say to us in today's gospel. But just a few chapters earlier he asked us to love those we're inclined to hate, to love our enemies. The first will be last, and the last will be first. The one who humbles himself will be exalted, the one who exalts himself will be humbled. And there are parables of reversal which we find only in Luke, the rich man and Lazarus, their situations reversed in the next world. The Pharisee and the publican, the one who goes home justified is the one you wouldn't expect to go home justified. The prodigal son and the elder brother, the one who is celebrated by his father is not the one you would expect to be celebrated by his father.
So there are these great stories and teachings about reversal, about the world being turned upside down. How is it possible then to be a disciple of this teacher? It can seem too difficult, too paradoxical, even a bit weird, some of these things, he asks. How are we supposed to count the cost like the man building the tower? How are we to prepare sensibly like the king going out to war? If we want to follow Christ, how do we count the cost? How do we prepare sensibly? By renouncing all that you have, he says. It's a condition of absolute simplicity, costing not less than everything, to quote T.S. Eliot's way of putting it. We follow him by bearing our own cross, by hating what we're inclined to love, even our own life.
That alerts us to something. We're to hate not just father and mother, wives and children, sisters and brothers, but even our own life. So is there anything clear in the middle of these paradoxes and reversals? What is clear is that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, to suffer and to die. That's clear. He's to be rejected by our world, which cannot find a place for him, which finds his message too difficult, too strange, too puzzling. There may be multitudes following him now, but by the time we get to Calvary, there would be very few, if any, who will remain behind.
Our world does not have a place for him, and we spit him out. But the great reversal of the resurrection breaks things open and turns the world finally and definitively upside down. It's no longer a question of us finding a place in our world for him, but of us following him into his world, where he has established a place for us. We must follow him into that mystery of the great reversal of his death and resurrection. In being baptised, we declare ourselves Christians, people who have taken the great reversal as the pattern of our lives. We die with him in order to come to new life in him.
So we have taken that great reversal and made it the pattern of our own lives. In being baptised, we're saying: this will be the criterion of my life, of my experience, of everything that happens to me, of all that I think, of all that I do, of all my relationships. This is the pattern, the criterion, against which I will evaluate everything.
In participating in the Eucharist, we allow this mystery of the great reversal to enter more deeply into us, as we taste already the gifts of the world that is to come. And we taste them along with our fathers and our mothers, with our wives and our children, with our brothers and our sisters, with all who share our faith in Christ. We are one with them in a new way.
Inevitably, we tend to domesticate Jesus, to take the harm out of him, to turn him into some kind of romantic teacher, harmless puppy, a moralist perhaps, at our disposal, in order to endorse the way we think things should be. And as we seek to domesticate Jesus, so too we seek to domesticate God. Today though, in this talk of hatred, Jesus keeps us awake and alert, keeps us unsure and watching, wondering about this, our God. A God who is wild and free. A God who is surprising and ever new in the mystery of his infinite love.
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