There are a ton of commands that we find in the Bible; statements that tell us to do this and not do that. The Bible says to love one another (John 13:35, Romans 13:8, Galatians 5:13, 1 Thessalonians 3:12, 4:19, Hebrews 10:24, 1 John 2:7, 3:11, 3:23, 4:7, 2 John 1:5-6), and Jesus said we should even love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-44), so this line always caused me to take a second look at the words of Jesus.
“If you want to be my disciple, you must hate everyone else by comparison, your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
Let me begin with a couple of confessions. At first, I am tempted to avoid this verse altogether. I could have easily skipped Luke 14:26, but to do that would have been to dismiss the tugging of the Spirit in my heart.
My next thought is, perhaps I wish Jesus didn’t say what he did in Luke 14:26. Verses like this are so difficult to understand, much less explain. They’re the sort of thing that opponents of Christianity drag out to make Jesus look both contradictory and cruel. It gives teenagers a biblical excuse to hate their parents. The one who told us to love our neighbors and even our enemies now wants us to hate our closest relatives. What sense does this make? To follow Christ is a contradiction and the Bible cannot be trusted to be accurate or true.
How do we make sense of this teaching? If we’re going to be fair in our reading, then we have to be wise interpreters. This means that we recognize when Jesus is speaking hyperbolically. Hyperbole is what we informally call exaggeration. It’s a way of communicating that uses bold overstatement and embellishment.
Hyperbole, which was common among teachers in Jesus’ culture, is not meant to be taken literally. If I say to you that I’m so hungry I could eat a horse, I would be distressed if you actually slaughtered a horse and prepared it for my dinner. What I mean is that I am feeling very, very hungry. So, given everything else he said and did, we can be sure that he was speaking hyperbolically when he said that to be his disciple we have to hate our families and even our own lives.
Yet, there is a danger in identifying hyperbole in the teaching of Jesus. It’s the danger of dismissing both his point and his urgency. If we think to ourselves, “Oh, Jesus didn’t really mean that,” then we run the risk of missing what he wants us to hear. It’s no longer a question of interpretation, but rather an indictment of the state of our hearts. When we encounter a biblical text that is unsettling to us, are we open to hear what God is really saying? Are we willing to have our comfortable life disturbed by the Word of God? Will we let the hyperbole of Jesus shake us up so that we might be more truly and fully his disciples?
Application: Let me encourage you to consider the last three questions when you read Scripture:
- Are you open to understanding the deeper meaning of the words of Jesus?
- Are you willing to make adjustments once you understand them?
- Will you let the hyperbole of Jesus shake you up, and rouse you out of your comfort zone?
God wants not only to instruct me, but also to stir me up, to create within me a crisis of understanding. God wants to break through my defenses and self-serving assumptions. God help us to be wise interpreters of the bible. May we learn to read attentively. May our hearts be open to God and his Word, ready to receive even that which unsettles us.
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