Luke’s context is not choosing one’s religion or faith over loving and affirming a family member. The context is choosing justice and inclusion even when your privileged family rejects you for doing so. This passage is about times when standing up for those being rejected and shunned causes division from those who reject and shun others:
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This is Part 2 of Hating One’s Family
(Read this series from its beginning here.)
“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son
and son against father,
mother against daughter
and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law . . . ” (Luke 12:49-56, NRSV)
These verses describe division but it’s the kind of division caused when someone is standing up for the vulnerable and marginalized and receive negative pushback as a result. The passage encourages standing up for justice, compassion and the wellbeing of all, even if that brings you into conflict with others you have a relationship with, and even if that relationship is family. (For more, read When Justice Means Division.)
Combine this lesson with the other theme in Luke’s gospel: that family means something very different in Jesus’ society than it has come to mean in ours. Long before our hyper-individualistic, self-reliant form of capitalism, Jesus’ society had an economic system that revolved around the family. This is one reason why widows and fatherless children were so vulnerable to harm: in a patriarchal system, their economic survival depended on them being part of a family and the mutual resource sharing that their family represented (see Lamentations 5:3 and Caring for Those Outside the Tribe).
Luke 14 isn’t about hating family as we think about family today. It is about something else, entirely. We’ll consider this alternative interpretation, in Part 3.
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