06/14/2026
Lesson 2. 6/14/2026. Hate Your Parents?
Jesus challenges His followers to pledge their total allegiance to Him. Therefore we need to put Jesus and His kingdom before any other relationship.
Last Week: We learned that believers must make the ongoing choice to listen and heed the Spirit’s leading, rather than deny His wisdom, benevolence, and guidance toward holy living.
This Week: We will learn of the importance of maintaining a healthy relationship with God, especially in comparison to all other earthly relationships.
Eastern civilizations typically have strong family ties that are multigenerational. In the West, these ties are generally much weaker. In fact, despite what we might say about valuing family, we may be surprised to learn that we do not value family nearly as much as the ancients did.
Disciples Put Jesus First
Jesus sent out His disciples to proclaim the same message He preached: “The kingdom of heaven has come near”. But, He warned them also to expect from others-—even their own families—indifference, insults, hatred, betrayal, persecution, and death threats. Matthew’s version of Jesus’ hard saying is actually an early, honest attempt to make sense of it for readers outside the Middle East. In that context, “hate” was a hyperbola for “love comparatively less”? . Love and hate here are not referring to emotions or feelings. They concern life-orienting decisions and priorities. For disciples to love Jesus more than family or oneself was to make Him their first priority. This required more than mere inner willingness. This meant actually abandoning all other attachments to follow Him. To “hate” one’s own life is not about self-loathing. It is to prefer Jesus above all else. Jesus demands that we set aside all the relationships and obligations that make us who we are naturally. Our families and friends must take a backseat to our singular allegiance to Jesus.1 Thoughtful readers will rightly object that this hard saying seems to contradict other biblical commands requiring followers—even adults-—to honor their parents. As believers, we must keep in mind, “devotion to family is a cardinal Christian duty but must never become absolute to the extent that devotion to God is compromised.”2 Jesus’ disciples must “take up the cross and follow” Him. We know a violent death on the cross would be Jesus’ fate. Jesus seemed to warn disciples that literal martyrdom might be their destiny as well. But, even if He used it as only an extreme metaphor, His claim was: To qualify to be His followers requires us to be “dead” (not simply willing to die) to this world’s routine expectations, which oppose God’s purposes (read Galatians 2:20; 6:14). Jesus’ claim in Matthew 10:39 that we find our life only by losing it for Him is His most frequently quoted saying in the Gospels. To be a disciple means following Jesus and His example of giving our lives to save others, living primarily for others. Only in this way may we find true life.
The Paradoxical Life of Discipleship
Jesus predicted His disciples would share His suffering. Taking up “their cross daily” described the suffering and “living agony” disciples were to expect in pursuing a lifestyle of self-denial.3 The choice to “follow” Jesus meant an end to their old way of life. The elaboration on this in verses 24-25 is fraught with irony and paradox. Jesus repeatedly claimed the opposite of what we normally consider to be true. Clearly, He was not literally urging disciples to a suicidal pursuit of martyrdom as the means of assuring their eternal salvation. “Cross-bearing means disciples lose their lives by expending them unselfishly. Reserving their lives for selfish purposes means losing the spiritual value of life.”4 What would it mean to be “ashamed” of Jesus and His teaching? The Greek verb, “ashamed,” refers to the experience of “a painful feeling or sense of loss of status because of some particular event or activity.”5 Shame might take the form of attempting to hide our allegiance to Jesus—the lowly, suffering “Son of Man"—because we care too much about how others value and esteem us. Or, it might take the form of claiming we are Christian disciples, while our true values and priorities are actually derived from the “world.”
A Revelation of Jesus’ Coming Glory
Some readers take this hard saying of Jesus as a possible prophecy. They imagine that Jesus predicted some of His first disciples would not die before “the kingdom of God” came in its fulness. Yet, all died nearly two millennia ago. Others take this mention of the kingdom’s coming as a cryptic reference to His resurrection on Easter Sunday and the coming of the Holy Spirit 50 days later at Pentecost. All the disciples except the betrayer, Judas, witnessed these events. But the far more likely reference is to the immediately following narrative in Luke 9:28-36. “About eight days after Jesus”. made His prediction in verse 27, His three closest disciples—”Peter, John, and James” (9:28)—were privileged to witness “the transfiguration”. When Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do you say I am?”! Peter’s answer, “God’s Messiah,” was technically correct. The Transfiguration narrative offers God’s definitive answer to the question of Jesus’ true identity: “This is my Son, whom I have chosen”. Three disciples momentarily witnessed the glory that will finally be His at the second coming, when the kingdom of God is fully consummated. They witnessed the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise.
Did You Know?
We cannot be authentic followers of Jesus until we understand who He really is. We cannot adequately comprehend who Jesus is unless we are His obedient disciples. But we cannot grasp any of this apart from divine revelation. God must reveal the truth to us. And if we “get” this, our confession carries comprehensive present and future consequences. This is crucial, since Luke 9:26 stresses that the way we relate to Jesus in this world determines our fate in the next.
Think About It
Jesus’ invitation for His followers to embrace the cross. has always been offensive. The intellectual elites of first century considered the Christian message folly. And religious elites viewed it as scandalous. Can we say with the apostle Paul: “But as for me, God forbid that I should boast about anything except for the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The world has been crucified to me through him, and I have been crucified to the world” (CEB)?
Reflect
Take time to think about what it means to daily take up the cross of Jesus.