Image: Painting depicting death of Onesimus, from the Menologion of Basil II (c. 1000 AD). (Wikipedia)
What better text could fall on Rally Day than these sweet, calm, family-friendly words of Jesus! Hate your father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, and sisters, or you can’t be a disciple. Give away everything you own, or you can’t be a disciple. Hate even life itself, or you can’t be a disciple. These words are, to put it mildly, disturbing. If they came from anyone else, we would rightly reject them outright as the ravings of a megalomaniac. After all, don’t cult leaders say similar things?
But coming from Jesus, we consider them more closely. Does Jesus mean we must literally hate our family? Is he crazy? Doesn’t this break the Fourth Commandment: “Honor your father and mother”?
It’s helpful to know how central the family was in first century Palestine and the wider Greco-Roman world. In both Jewish and Gentile households, the household was the center of economic and social life. Multiple generations lived together under one roof (as is still the case in most of the world). While each married couple often lived in their own section of the house, in-laws were only a door away! The household was also the center of economic activity. (The Greek word for household, oikos, is at the root of our word “economy”.) Most people were self-employed. A father was responsible for teaching his sons a trade to increase household income and pay off the taxman. Households often grew their own food and made their own clothing. And in both Gentile and Jewish households, the father was at the center of family life. In Jewish households, women did not have the privilege to divorce their husbands. Fathers could also deny the paternity of their children by refusing to name them. (This is why it is such a big deal in Luke’s Gospel when Zechariah names his son, John.) In Roman households, the father had the power of life and death over the other members of his household: wives, children, and slaves. Family, particularly its patriarch, was everything in the ancient world.
So, Jesus’ words would have been even more offensive then than they are now. The fact he says this to the crowds only increases the offense! In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives this hard saying to disciples; here he includes everyone! So, what’s going on?
Like most things in the scriptures, this is a First Commandment issue. Explaining what it means to have “god” in the first place, Luther wrote in his Large Catechism, “A ‘god’ is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart….Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.”[1] While strong, centered families built on love and trust are necessary for the health of church and society, it is also true that we can make family an idol. Worse, we can idolize our idea of what a family should be. Parents, how often do we idolize our children? How often have you seen family members idolized? How often can loyalty be weaponized in a family to enable abuse? (By the way, it doesn’t take much searching to find this weaponization of family loyalty in the public sphere.) So, when Jesus tells us that we must “hate” our own families, he is being deliberately provocative to make a point. He’s not literal. This isn’t much different from his call to chop off body parts to prevent sin! Even if our family is the kindest, most loyal, most loving, most supportive family in the universe, it still is to take a back seat to our love of and reliance upon God. The same is true for all good gifts of God, including possessions and even life itself.
After all, Jesus our brother has brought us into his own family, not by compulsion, but by through his own suffering and death. And this is a family where no one is better or worthier than anyone else. Not even a wealthy householder and patron of the gospel like Philemon is better than his runaway slave, Onesimus. When Paul writes this letter from prison, he reminds Philemon of the ultimate fatherhood of God and our siblinghood in Jesus Christ. His appeal is that Philemon would receive Onesimus back, “no longer as a slave but more than a slave—a beloved brother”. It’s hard to overstate how radical this request would have been in the Greco-Roman household. The message is clear: Onesimus is now a brother in the Lord, so the old hierarchies no longer apply. As Paul says elsewhere, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[2]
So, Jesus is indeed crazy by worldly standards! No longer does anything of this world have ultimate status: not our family, not what we own, not our work. Rather, we look to God our Father and our brother Jesus the Christ. Our brother Jesus blazed the trail for us through the thickets of sin and death. He defeated those powers that claim ultimate loyalty for themselves, so that we could belong to our Father God forever. What Jesus is by nature—the Son of God—we are by adoption. And it was at our baptism that we were made children of God. Water and the word, it turns out, are thicker than blood. As we go through Luke’s Gospel over the next few months, we will hear more about this family of God we belong to, and about the love of God which binds us together.
So, God help us remember that God is always our refuge and strength, to whom we look for all good. At this table, we get a foretaste of that good when we receive our Lord in Holy Communion. And God help us remember that he has united us all in his family, no longer defined by status or blood, but by his utterly unmerited grace and love. Thanks be to God. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.
[1] Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 386.
[2] Galatians 3:28.