Good Morning Yamon Ki Yesepar and Nevim Arith Hayomim:
Luke 14:26: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
Every pastor at some time in his career will be confronted with someone asking him about this verse and if Jesus was really teaching us to hate our families. I have yet to meet anyone who honestly believes Jesus was instructing us to literally hate our kinfolk, yet we continually allow our translators to plug in the word “hate” in this verse.
Obviously, Jesus is speaking in some sort of metaphor or hyperbolely. Thus, we easily say: “What Jesus meant…” and I will let you fill in the blank as you can do that just as easily if not better than I can. What concerns me is that in the Greek the word used here is misei which is the Greek word for hate. You can’t get around it, Jesus clearly used the word hate and that is why translators do not water it down with some softer English word. To be sure in some rare cases misei can simply mean to love less or to not give as much esteem, but we are still talking about degrees of affection. Should a wife be more affectionate to Jesus than to her husband? This is where this verse and the use of the word misei gets a little tricky.
As a pastor I have seen marriages break down and even fall apart because a wife or a husband neglects his or her mate in favor of service to God. Many times it is just an excuse to get out of the house and away from an abusive husband or a nagging wife, but then there are those who are really torn over their own love for their mates and their love for God when contradictions seem to arise. Take the husband who feels a real call of God to give up a good job and go to seminary or enter the ministry. He loves God and hungers to serve God but his wife is not ready to make the sacrifice. Is that poor soul supposed to love God more than his wife in this situation? Tough call, glad I am not a pastor anymore.
Maybe this is another reason I am convinced the Gospels were written in Aramaic and not Greek, the Aramaic makes more sense. This is definitely not the only reason I believe the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic, but it is high up there on the list. The Aramaic word that is used here is sana’ which means to be prickly, a thorn, or an irritant, like a briar stuck on your leg. My study partner has that down pat, when she is convinced she has heard from God she makes no end to being a thorn in my flesh about it until I am driven to prayer over the matter.
The Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago had a little sign over the doorway which said: “Your mother’s prayers brought you here.” Many a wayward man was brought to his knees over that little sana’ at home on her knees praying and weeping for her boy; that mother who stood in the gap for her son, who never wavier in her belief and trust in God. I remember working in a halfway house and talking with recovering drug addict. I asked him what it was that really turned him away from drugs and to God. He said he had a Christian wife who would just irritate him to death telling him that she was praying for him. One day he found her on her knees weeping and praying to God to save him and it made him so mad that he punched her in the stomach. After that, every time he picked up a needle he saw in his mind’s eye his wife lying on the floor crying in pain and calling out to God to save him.
I believe that is sana’ and if you want to plug in the word hate for sana’ then go right ahead, but I think I will render this in a way that most closely reflects the Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke and that is: “If any man will come to me and is not willing to be a spiritual thorn to his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers and sisters, and his own life also, cannot be my disciple.” In other words if you are not willing to stand in the gap for your family, willing to take a firm stand for their eternal salvation and their spiritual welfare, yes, even to be beaten and face death for their salvation, then you cannot be His disciple. After all, Jesus himself demonstrated the perfect sana’ when he suffered and died on the cross for us. That picture of him suffering and dying for my personal sins which I should be on that cross for is a real irritant or sana’ in my life.
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