Does Jesus actually want us to 'hate' our family members?
Christ tells us the cost of discipleship: not only must we carry our cross, but we must 'hate' father, mother, wife and children—even our own life. But what did he mean?
Christ tells us the cost of discipleship: not only must we carry our cross, but we must ‘hate’ father, mother, wife and children—even our own life. But what did he mean?
Editor’s Notes
This is the last part of the chapter which deals with the episodes read at Mass on the Second and Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. It deals with the challenging words of Christ:
“If any man come to Me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.”
Was Christ really saying, in this Gospel episode, that we must actually hate our family members?
No, he was not – nor is this how the Church has understood it.
The fourth commandment requires us to honour our parents, and the idea that Christ enjoined a violation of this commandment is as unthinkable as him enjoining a violation of the first commandment, or the fifth, sixth, or any other.
Further, we have natural duties of love and piety towards those who are closest to us in the so-called “ordo amoris.” We also have many examples of the saints who did indeed love their family members.
However, there is an important lesson to be learnt here. Fr Coleridge explains what Christ’s teaching meant, and how it has been understood by his Church ever since.
For more context on this section, and its place in the Gospel and the Liturgy, see Part I.
Our Lord in the Pharisee’s House
The Preaching of the Cross, Part II
Chapter VIII
St. Luke xiv. 1-35.
Story of the Gospels, § 111-3
Burns and Oates, London, 1887
Why did Christ provoke His enemies with miracles on the Sabbath?
Christ’s warning: The Banquet will go on—with or without you
How the call to the Church passed from Israel to the Gentiles
We are to ‘hate’ father and mother?
St. Luke passes on to other teachings of our Lord in Judaea or Peraea, in which what He had already said elsewhere was repeated and insisted on.
There are usually some variations in the later teaching, in harmony with the circumstances of the time. The specimen before us is an instance of this. When our Lord had before spoken about the necessity of not loving father or mother more than Himself, His words were addressed to the Apostles only. When He had spoken to the multitudes, after the Confession of St. Peter and the prediction of the Passion, He had said nothing about hating those who are naturally dearest to man. That He should now be followed by great multitudes cannot surprise us.
It was usually the case with Him, and if He was now in a part of the country in which He had not before preached, the people would be still more attracted by His presence. Many of them may have had very imperfect notions about the character of His doctrines and of its requirements, and may have followed Him because others did so, and because of His miracles. The time of the great trial of the Passion was close at hand, and it was well that the warning which He had given in Galilee, when the doctrine of the Cross was first proclaimed, should now be repeated.
‘And there went great multitudes with Him. And turning He said to them, If any man come to Me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. And whosoever doth not carry his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple.’
We have here to understand what it is that our Lord means when He says that, in order to be His disciple, a man must hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life also.
In the first place, what is it to be His disciple? It may mean either of two things—discipleship as far as was obligatory, as we should say of ordinary Christians, who are bound to the observance of the commandments, or of the counsels as far as they belong to their individual vocations, and that kind of discipleship which is the vocation of Apostolical men, who are called to follow our Lord in the arduous work of preaching and propagating the Gospel.
We may suppose that the words cannot be entirely confined to either of these classes, but as they are primarily addressed to the multitudes, their first meaning must refer to that discipleship which is obligatory on all, and that when our Lord invites and calls any one to the observation of the counsels beside that of the commandments, or still more, to the work of the Apostolical life, it is meant that a man so called must hate father and mother and all that are dearest to him in the sense in which such hatred is required towards such relations.
What is meant
The next question is, what is meant by this hatred? The language here goes beyond that which our Lord had used when He gave His great charge to the Apostles.1 Then He had said:
‘He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me. And he that taketh not up his cross and followeth Me, is not worthy of Me.’
Now He requires, not simply that no one should be loved more than He, but comparative hatred of those who are dearest to us in the natural order, if our regard for them in any way interferes with our love for Him. In the former case He had meant that, though we are to love our own with all due natural affection, still, we are not to allow the love of them to come between us and our Lord, that love is to give way, as a motive of action, to the love of our Lord.
The difference now made is that our Lord speaks of hatred, that is, that besides choosing our Lord’s will and the requirements of His law before all human love, we are to have a most true aversion and hatred for any human affection, however natural and legitimate, which interferes with what we are to feel and do out of love for our Lord. And it is the same with our own life also. That is, we are not simply to surrender it, if so be, in obedience to our duty to Him. We are to be ready for this with a real and true hatred of it, in so far as it comes between us and Him.
There have been in times of persecution, and there may be at any time, occasions when Christians have had to act as if they hated the objects of natural love, and our Lord now counsels the preparation of the heart for such occasions. The passage about the carrying the cross must be understood in the same way as before. We are to bear the daily burthen of the commandments and counsels, the hard and laborious works, afflictions, and persecutions which belong to us as disciples of our Lord in any of the degrees spoken of above, to bear that cross joyously as well as obediently, in order to be in the proper sense His disciples.
Counting the cost
We are familiar enough with these Divine words, though our familiarity does not ensure the fulfilment of them in ourselves. But they must have sounded strange indeed in the ears of many among the multitude, who may have had altogether temporal and carnal notions of the new Kingdom and of the condition of the followers of its gracious and most loveable King.
Our Lord proceeds to give them reasons founded on common prudence, not so much for the truth that the disciples must hate their dearest relatives and themselves also, as for the warning which He gives them as to the conditions of discipleship to Him. He seems to say, I tell you this at once that you may count the cost, and be under no deception as to what will be required of you if you follow Me. It is but common wisdom to count the cost before you embark in any undertaking:
‘For which of you having a mind to build a tower, doth not first sit down and reckon the charges that are necessary, whether he hath wherewith to finish it, lest after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that see it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish.’
And then, as if remembering that the Christian course was a warfare as well as a building, He puts the same truth under this other image.
‘For what king about to make war against another king, doth not first sit down and think whether he be able, with ten thousand, to meet him that, with twenty thousand, cometh against him? Or else, whilst the other is yet afar off, sending an embassy, he desireth conditions of peace. So likewise every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth, cannot be My disciple.’
The two-fold imagery which our Lord here employs may serve very well to represent to us the double character of the difficulties which are to be encountered in the spiritual life considered as the following of our Lord.
It is an edifice, beginning with the digging of foundations, deep and secure, and continued by the painful and costly toil of laying brick upon brick, or stone upon stone, until the building rises high in the air like a tower, soaring above the earth and reaching the heavens. This daily and continual labour requires perseverance as well as an abundance of materials, and it must occupy our whole lives till the end is gained.
But it is an edifice which has another aspect, as the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem had to be carried on by men who were girt to battle, their swords in one hand and their tools for building in the other. The very laying the foundations alarms all the hostility of most watchful, sleepless, powerful, and bitter enemies, and they will beset us during the whole of our life with various temptations which will cease only with life itself.
These are the conditions under which the discipleship to our Lord must be undertaken, and it is therefore most foolish and imprudent to enter on the undertaking with a light and careless heart. They are conditions which may well appal the boldest, especially when it is considered that the conflict is to last for life.
Renunciation
Here, again, we must remember what has been said about the difficulties of salvation. The obstacles are enormous, but the aids of grace are far more powerful. What our Lord desires is not that we should shrink back as cowards, but that we should arm ourselves as soldiers for the fight.
He would have us consider all these things, and then use the same instrument of consideration as to the motives which urge us to the undertaking of the warfare, the necessity of salvation, the lesson of the judgments of God, the example and instruction of our Lord, the love we owe Him for His Passion, and the greatness of the Redemption purchased thereby. And He sums up in one word the price that we must pay for the victory over all our enemies, the truth to which all our considerations of the dangers to be faced, the enemies to be overcome, the reward to be gained, must lead us, and the one word in which the truth is conveyed is renunciation.
‘So likewise every one of you that doth not renounce all he possesseth, cannot be My disciple.’
This renouncement must be in all as to affection. Nothing must be loved or valued or clung to at the cost of the love of our Lord. But in many it must be actual, and in any case actual renouncement is the best security for renouncement in affection, and removes a thousand difficulties out of our way as our Lord’s followers. But our Lord does not here draw out that doctrine, and indeed, He had not as yet delivered to His disciples the counsels of poverty, humility, chastity, and the like.
Salt losing its savour
That the subject of entire renunciation may have been in our Lord’s mind when He spoke these last words, in connection with the Apostles and others who had carried them out or were to carry them out to the letter, may be concluded from the sentence which He immediately added:
‘Salt is good. But if the salt should lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is neither profitable for the land nor the dunghill, but shall be cast out.’
He had already used the image of salt of His disciples generally, but principally, no doubt, of those who were nearest to Him, in the Sermon on the Mount. Then He had said, after giving the Beatitudes:
‘You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt have lost its savour, by what shall it be salted? It is then good for nothing, but to be cast out and be trodden upon by men.’
The Apostles were not as yet chosen when these words were uttered, nor may all of them at that time have actually renounced all that they had in the world. Their sacrifice was not completed. But our Lord knew that the time would come when it would be completed both in their case and in the case of thousands of others, and that the succession of those who would follow them in this respect would be continued for ever in the Church as long as the world lasted.
Moreover, there is a very true sense indeed in which the whole body of the faithful is spoken of as the salt of the earth, by means of which the rest of the world is preserved in whatever of good remains to it. And indeed in the earliest ages it began to be the case that one of the greatest influences for good in the Church lay in the holy lives of its members in general.
The means by which the salt of the earth is kept fresh and full of savour is that renunciation of earthly goods and that hatred of all that interferes with the perfect following of our Lord of which He had been speaking. The corrupting and deteriorating influences on every side, however, were to be as He foresaw perpetually active, and alas! perpetually successful. And Christians were to be of necessity for ever on the watch against these insidious evils, stealthily eating away the life and vigour of the spiritual element in souls and in society in general.
Therefore He subjoins the note of warning, ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’
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St. Matt. x. 37–39; Story of the Gospels, § 79.
I don’t particularly hate my mother, I just disown her since she is after a witch who conceived me on a pentagram, never wanted me and is a rather dismal excuse for a human being really - prophetically speaking it’s why I have been drawn to Catholicism eventually, it is His way of restoring to me that which Satan took, a mother worthy of the name. I don’t honour my father spiritually either since he took on a lot of her paganism, I am waiting for the opportunity to evangelise him which the Lord assures me will occur in due time. He overcompensated by being too permissive, he is a good man but the Most High was my disciplinarian, He let me wander lost down many a blind alley and forged me in the fire of His fury.
This isn’t the 1950s, a lot of parents must be renounced for they have fallen into grave error, a lot of homes are broken, some by the vilest sin (my exs dismal mother comes to mind here) and a lot of us are orphans spiritually. The boomer generation did so much spiritual damage with its embrace of promiscuous sexuality and liberalism - there should be no honour for its debauchery instead it’s children must learn from it what not to do and solidly rebuke its evil.