Luke 14- Emo Jesus

For a while in this chapter, Jesus sounds like he’s gone emo. Check out what he says: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Whoa, wait a minute—this sounds pretty depressing. And it doesn’t sound much like the Jesus I’ve been reading about for 14 chapters now, the Jesus who taught love.

But let’s take it a little deeper. Personally, I don’t think Jesus was laying out a requirement that, to follow him, we have to literally hate our families and our lives. I don’t believe for a minute that he would tell us to love our neighbors and even love our enemies, but hate our families. So what does he mean?

If you read the rest of this passage (Luke 14:25-33) he gives examples of a person building a tower and a king preparing for war, and points out that these people would not jump right in until they had counted the cost and weighed out whether they were able to accomplish their goal. So it is with following Jesus. It’s easy to say, “I’ll follow you,” but as I’ve talked about before in these posts, it’s not always as easy to actually follow him.

I think Jesus was issuing a reminder that people who want to follow him need to be aware of what it will really be like and they need to look at what it may cost them. After all, to truly follow Jesus means recognizing that even the most important things have to become less important than him. We have to follow wholeheartedly, without excuses, and I think he’s telling the people to consider whether they are able to do that. It can be extraordinarily hard to let go of even the material things in life, like money and possessions, to follow him—but it is even harder to be willing to say, “Yes, Jesus, I will put you above everything else in my life, even my own family and myself, because I love you that much.” No, that’s not always easy. But is following Jesus worth the cost? Is it worth giving up our false sense of control and putting him first? Yes, I think it is.