Better Listen!

 (I'm back to Lectio Divina today)

Luke 14:25-35

³³ “So every one of you who doesn’t renounce all that he has cannot be my talmid. ³⁴ Salt is excellent. But if even the salt becomes tasteless, what can be used to season it? ³⁵ It is fit for neither soil nor manure — people throw it out. Those who have ears that can hear, let them hear!”

These are the verses which say that unless we hate our parents and siblings, and yes, even ourselves, we can’t be followers of Christ.

I looked up the Greek word miseō in Mounce’s Interlinear, which is translated as “hate,” and it gives the option of “love less than” and “esteem less” in the citation for this verse from Luke. Maybe “hate” isn’t the best word to use in translating from the Greek. I suspect that the word miseō has corollaries in Greek that it doesn’t have in English.

Rabbinically speaking, the consensus is that Jesus is indeed talking about “hate”. There is one exception to the law in Torah about honoring and obeying our parents, and that is when the parent demands that we ignore or deny the Sabbath— the holy, or divine. In that case, the rabbis say to ignore our parent.

The implication is that Jesus embodies the Holy, and so no distractions are important enough to take precedence. In that case Jesus does mean “hate”—to hate whatever distances or separates us from God.

The thing is, though, this verse has a built in distraction in the first couple of sentences, and so we tend to skip over the very clear instruction or teaching about how to order our priorities. Jesus goes on to talk about building a tower, and about preparing to go to battle to defend a kingdom. It’s all about resources.

I’m reminded of the modern term “spoon theory” which describes metaphorically what it’s like to live with severely limited physical and emotional energy, in terms of the number of spoons a person has available.

Jesus isn’t saying that hating our parents will enable us to follow him. That’s actually a bit warped. The teaching is: don’t set out to accomplish something without counting the cost. Don’t make faulty assumptions. Don’t assume it will be easy. Understand how high the stakes are. Don’t start what you can’t finish.

There are a lot of other places in the gospel where Jesus gets annoyed with people who are following him for the entertainment value of it. In this instance, he’s speaking to the same kind of crowd, and he’s basically saying, “Put up, or shut up!” He’s challenging them to examine their assumptions.

He’s trying to shake their confidence by getting them to take a hard look at the reality— that following him will lead to grief and loss. That they’d better be willing to give up everything, and that they won’t be able to stick to their choice without the understanding that they will lose everything— everything and everyone that they care about, including their own lives. He’s telling them that unless they have a clear understanding of what it is that would make all that loss worthwhile, they might as well turn around and go home.

“Those whose ears hear, had better listen!”