Jesus: if you want to be my disciple, you have to hate your family (disciples, prophecy)
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Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
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Luke 14:26: If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
There is no way in Hades that I'm going to start hating my family just because some scripture says so.
Are you?
And I suspect somebody is going to give us 18 paragraphs of why one should not take this literally and why it might be out of context.
It is at the end of a parable, it is in context, it's clear what it says, it's clear what it means, it's absolutely against anything that my morals would accept.
Luke 14:26: If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
There is no way in Hades that I'm going to start hating my family just because some scripture says so.
Are you?
And I suspect somebody is going to give us 18 paragraphs of why one should not take this literally and why it might be out of context.
It is at the end of a parable, it is in context, it's clear what it says, it's clear what it means, it's absolutely against anything that my morals would accept.
I have no qualms about picking apart things within the bible that don't make sense (and there's plenty of fuel for that fire within it's pages), but even I can see how this passage could be hyperbolic.
That passage is one of the ones that mainstream Christianity has had to ignore - or 'reintepret' - in order to thrive. And that's an interesting aspect of religions. In the long run, in order to survive and gain and maintain widespread popularity, then need to smooth off the rough edges - throw over the severely antisocial aspects that are simply going to drive most people away.
Cults, however, which flourish in small numbers and are based on building walls between themselves and everyone else, often have a lot of use for those religious tenets that prove so problematic for maturing religions.
It's no small bit of irony when a fringe cult is more faithful to a particular passage than the widespread denominations who just wish that passage would go away!
The severe self sacrifice, even to the point of abandoning family, aspects of the Jesus message, only make sense if we embrace the idea that Jesus truly believed that the end of the earthly world was immediately at hand.
Suppose that you were the sole support for your family. Jesus comes by and says to follow him and you do. What happens to the elderly parents, wife and children when their support is removed? Could Jesus really be so cruel minded as to insist that following him around is more important than the survival of your family?
Yes, but only in a dynamic where everyone's suffering would be ending quickly anyway.
When presented with the evidence, as in the direct quotes, from Jesus which indicate that he believed that the world would be ending within the lifetimes of his immediate audience, the faithful really have to perform grand mental gymnastics to excuse Jesus for obviously getting this wrong and explain why 2000 years later the prophecy remains unfulfilled.
But....if you do accept whatever explanations the faithful supply for this delay of the Apocalypse, then we are left trying to explain how Jesus could be so cruel as to demand that people leave wives and children to follow him when the world wasn't about to end.
That passage is one of the ones that mainstream Christianity has had to ignore - or 'reintepret' - in order to thrive. And that's an interesting aspect of religions. In the long run, in order to survive and gain and maintain widespread popularity, then need to smooth off the rough edges - throw over the severely antisocial aspects that are simply going to drive most people away.
Cults, however, which flourish in small numbers and are based on building walls between themselves and everyone else, often have a lot of use for those religious tenets that prove so problematic for maturing religions.
It's no small bit of irony when a fringe cult is more faithful to a particular passage than the widespread denominations who just wish that passage would go away!
It's the cult-like nature of Jesus's words that resonate with truth.
Most cults desire to have its members completely and hopelessly dependent upon the cult leader and its other members for the things a family and friends would normally provide. The more cut-off and isolated a cult member is from the rest of the world, the less likely and less possible it is for a member to leave.
Since Christianity essentially started off as a messianic cult taken from Jewish prophecy, it stands to reason that the cult leader - Jesus - would demand that his followers forsake family and friends and follow only him. I know people are wont to assume Jesus was a nice, decent, sinless man, the Son of God, so he would never behave in such a cult-like way.
But there it is in black and white. He issued a number of decrees that intimates the cult status of his "congregation." For instance, his decree about not saving or planning for tomorrow - live only for today and do not worry about the future. Obviously a new member of a cult might indeed be worried about how he is going to survive, where his meals will come from, where he'll sleep every night. Put all those thoughts aside and just trust in Jesus.
Trust in the cult. Trust in its leadership - the council of 12 apostles. Thus when Jesus came back to Cult Headquarters carrying fish, loaves of bread, kegs of wine, etc. it was "a miracle" ... and that's how it was written. Food and drink was conjured from thin air, such a "miracle" it was. Come, follow Jesus. Put your trust in him, expand the cult, and infinite loaves and fishes will be yours! Just don't ask where he got them since I doubt magical food has been thoroughly tested and approved by the Food & Drug Administration.
I have no qualms about picking apart things within the bible that don't make sense (and there's plenty of fuel for that fire within it's pages), but even I can see how this passage could be hyperbolic.
Neither do I have a problem with such picking apart, but when one cherry picks without taking into consideration the whole message and/or cultural idiom to bolster a clearly hostile opinion, I do. I don't defend this particular passage as such, but to say that it means that Jesus was setting up a cult in the face of everything else He taught about relating to the people around you, pardon me, but your bias is showing.
The content do not seek change. Jesus intended to make some big changes. He drew on the poor, and marginalized to shake things up at the Temple and with Rome.
I believe Jesus was speaking in the comparative sense.
You are correct in that we hate only in a sense that we should love the love the Lord so so much more to follow Him, so hate is in a comparative sense. It is not to say we hate our parents it is to say we love the love the Lord tons more and willing to follow Him
Supposedly the family of Jesus thought he was crazy when he first started talking about being the son of God and when he first went out to preach. Is this true? I thought Mary and Joseph knew right from the start that Jesus was the son of God. Could it be that he rejected his family at first because they tried to stop him?
In this video Jesus tells his followers that those who love God are his family.
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