Sayings of Jesus: “Hate Your Family”!

I’ve written a series of articles about “sayings of Jesus” over the last couple of years (there’s a search facility on the main blog page if you want to view them). Some may be challenging sayings, but I think they’ve all been ‘nice’ ones. In fact, you’d expect them to be ‘nice’ because we all know Jesus is ‘nice.’ So what are we supposed to do with this one?

Part of me was thinking I would do a swerve around this one and go for something easier. Not least because—although I am slightly parodying ‘nice’ here—my paradigm on Jesus is that he is, genuinely, nice! Do I really want to grapple with a saying that seems to suggest otherwise? Should discretion be the better part of valour, or would that just be cowardice?

Before we go any further, let’s look at the whole text, in Luke 14:25–27, rather than relying on my paraphrase in the title.

Large crowds were travelling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: ‘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. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

At first blush, it doesn’t feel like we can interpret away the plain and obvious sense of the word ‘hate’ here. It says what it says. The vast majority of English translations render the Greek as ‘hate.’ No wonder, since there’s not much wriggle room: miseō does, indeed, mean … ‘hate.’ So what are we to do? Try to copy Jesus by doing the same kind of hating of the same people? Or is there more to be said?

Let’s walk through an interpretive process—what we might call bringing some “voices to the table” to make their contribution to figuring out the puzzle.

Firstly, this is a one-off verse.

It is bad practice to build a theology on any one-off verse, not least when it appears to be antithetical to the rest of Scripture; in this case, to everything else Jesus had to say. There is no other instance in the Gospels of Jesus saying he hated anyone or that we should hate anyone (not even enemies). One-off verses tend by nature to be obscure and hence, liable to misreading.

Always remember—Word of God as it may be—it’s passed (in this case) from Aramaic memories, into written Greek, through multiple copied manuscripts, in some cases via Latin, then through many centuries of evolving English, into contemporary English. That’s quite a journey.

Then we’ve got genre considerations.

Could this be another instance of hyperbole (the Expanded Bible offers a footnote suggesting that), or a figure of speech of some sort (some commentators suggest it’s a Hebrew idiom)? Rather like, when Jesus said, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Other than The First Church of the Hand Cutters Off, I don’t think many congregations take that literally, despite a ‘literal’ reading being the one most evangelicals are primed to go for, wherever that doesn’t seem impossible—and always, it seems, if the text appears to be about hell! But I digress ….    

Then there’s the witness of Scripture as a whole.

The most obvious teaching that flatly contradicts this statement is the fifth commandment—the first one to focus on human relationships: “Honour your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12 and Deut 5:16). Would Jesus really contradict that? No—in fact, he specifically affirmed it, in Matthew 15:4 and 19:19, and criticised those who “nullified” it (“made it void”) by allowing their own traditions/interests to take priority.

A few translations frame it as a less dramatic contrast. For example, the Easy Bible says, “He must love me more than he loves …” But is that too easy? Is it tempting us to dilute the plain sense of the word for the sake of preserving Jesus’ nice guy reputation?               

There are two further ingredients—two more voices to invite to the table— before we draw a conclusion.

The first is what appears to be a parallel account in Matthew’s Gospel.

‘Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’ Matthew 10:37.

Many scholars believe that Matthew and Luke draw material that’s not found in Mark from a common source (written or oral) that’s usually called “Q”. It’s a theory, because we don’t have any copies of Q. Still, if so, this would quite likely be an instance. Clearly, the word ‘hate’ is not in the Matthean account—the word there is phileō (a word for ‘love’).

Given the lack of other supporting evidence in Scripture for Jesus encouraging us to hate people—even enemies—it would seem that this is the most likely way to read what Luke’s passage intends to be saying. Especially when we allow for those other potential factors—those other voices around the table.     

The final ingredient for consideration is the surrounding context in Luke 14.

We must be careful not to be reading too much into the literary sequencing of sayings and events in the Gospels; sometimes it’s relevant, other times it may not be. What we can say is that the Gospel writers consciously assembled their materials (their research) to best convey the story and teaching from their perspective, inspired by the Holy Spirit. They were conveying theology as well as history, and doing so from slightly different vantage points.

The positioning may be relevant in this instance. In Luke 14, we see three ‘mini parables’ preceding Jesus’ shock statement—three different people invited to a banquet who all decide they have more important things to do. The imagery of the ‘banquet’ is the kingdom—the end of the age—‘heaven’ for short.

Then after that shock statement we began with, we see another three parables (or at least, metaphors): the need to ‘count the cost’ before you start to build a tower; to count the size of your army before going into battle against another army that might be twice the size; and the tragedy of salt which once was good but then loses its saltiness. All these surrounding stories and sayings appear to me to be related to our commitment to Jesus. They’re all variations on that theme. Different questions to ask ourselves—honest questions. The kind of thing to chat about in a home group.  

Is it legitimate for a Bible version to—quite literally—change what Jesus actually said in Luke to correspond to what he said in Matthew, in what seems to be a potentially comparable passage? Bearing in mind, there is no scope to be doing that from the Greek text in Luke. And, there’s every possibility that Jesus could have said similar things on more than one occasion (highly likely, in fact), so this may not be a strictly parallel account. Is it, therefore, legitimate to import from Matthew in that way, to correspond to a preferred interpretation?  

The answer to that depends on what the translators are aiming to do—publish a ‘word-for-word’ translation, or a ‘thought-for-thought’ (idea-for-idea) translation.

There is no such thing as either, in a strict sense, but the former aims to accurately translate each individual word from the original language to the extent possible, whereas the latter aims to make the same core thinking underlying those words tangible to a contemporary audience. The Message paraphrase is at the extreme end of the latter; more traditional versions like the ESV, NASB, and NRSV are more the former. NIV and NLT are somewhere in between and probably the best balance for the average reader.  

However, not even a word-for-word translation is ‘pure’ in that sense (for example, the word order in the original languages may be different and need some English words added to make the sentence make sense).

And—this is important—in both cases, there is interpretation going on. Translation is a form of interpretation; there is no uninterpreted Scripture! For example, if a publishing house comes from a Reformed evangelical tradition, it will ensure its translators reflect Reformed theology in their choice of key words and phrases (e.g. in Romans). And KJV fans, sorry, but yours is not the most accurate, authentic, or closest-to-the-original version, not by a long shot! It’s not “The one the Apostle Paul used” (even though its archaic language makes it sound like it might have been).   

So in sum, we have a choice as to how to read Jesus’ words in that Luke passage—exactly what he meant, and why. But the least credible conclusion would be a strictly literal instruction to “Hate your family”!