HATE SPEECH?

Cosimo Rosselli, 'The Sermon on the Mount' 

`If any one doth come unto me, and doth not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and yet even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple;  and whoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, is not able to be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26-7; today's Gospel.)

There is no way around it: J.B. Phillips, in his modern New Testament translation, put quotation marks around ‘hate’, but the Greek verb is uncompromising. This is one of Jesus’ more rebarbative sayings, one of those we would rather forget; the more as the current Church insists that every believer should be a mathètès, a disciple. So, we say, what about the man and wife who are to be one flesh? We are to love the little ones, the children – just not our children? We are to honour our parents, yet hate them?

The saying goes, of course, with Jesus’ snarky reaction to his mother and brothers’ coming to visit him: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . These are mother and my brothers’, pointing to the disciples (Mt 12:46-7); and Matthew 19:29, where anyone who leaves everything (home, father, mother, sisters, brothers, wife, and property) to follow him will receive a hundredfold return and eternal life. Extreme, also: still, giving up is less than hating.

How do we deal with such a saying? One way is to say that Jesus, in his humanity, was truly human (in all things, we are told, except sin), and that thus he was capable of impatience and irritation as he was of exhaustion and depression. In that sense, the saying Luke reports comes from a simple, indeed a simplistic, binary ‘love’ and ‘hate’. He does not, in other words, mean the verb literally. (Hence Phillips’ quotation marks.)

Another way of dealing with it is to remember that ‘Matthew’ was part of the early Church, and that his Gospel, like the other Synoptics, doesn’t want only to recount Jesus’s sayings and doings in great accuracy but is engaged, as part of the Church, in building an edifice for those who have not been there, and future generations, to live in. The extreme terms, then, are those of a community that has to deal with members who regularly privilege their private affairs over those of the ecclesia.

Leaving history aside, though, we need to know how we are to deal with these words.  And there, I think, another passage from Matthew comes to our aid. This comes in the discourse on the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, says Jesus: but ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Matthew 6:33)

Here, I think, may be the key to our passage of hate. Hyperbole aside, we need to concentrate on the kingdom (basileia, perhaps better translated the ‘kingship’, the reign) of God: both on recognising it in Jesus, who is the Kingdom, and in bringing it about in the world where he is no longer physically present. ‘Seeking first’ is beginning the day with the prayer that we may do His will that day, and that we may not forget that by lunchtime. (The noontime Angelus is a good reminder.) It’s not a matter of hating A, but of going all out to pursue B – in which case, if A gets in the way, you brush A aside impatiently – which, to A, may feel like hate but isn’t. (And in any case, it only happens if A gets in the way.) 

And, he says, if we do so; if all we consciously care about is doing His will, is living His kingship; why, then our parents, our spouse, our children, our property, ‘will be added unto us’, will be there, but as gifts, not earnings, and thus all the more precious. Not only will we find what we seek, i.e. the kingdom of God, but we will find ourselves showered with all those other good things that we thought we had but didn’t really until now, when we receive them all over again, as God’s gifts. And eternal life as well. 

One final thought: on the way to the kingdom of God, on the way of our pursuit, there may well be a cross. And that we cannot, must not brush aside: for He is the kingdom, and it is from the Cross that He reigns. At the very least there is death, for all of us; for some there is great suffering. But among the gifts we receive there is Resurrection -- Zoèn aionion, eternal life.