Luke 14:25-27

“ And there went great multitudes with Him: and He turned, and said unto them, 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. 27. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. ”

Seeing those crowds, Jesus is aware that between Him and them there is a misunderstanding. The gospel, rightly apprehended, will not be the concern of the multitude. He lifts His voice to reveal this false situation: You are going up with me to Jerusalem, as if you were repairing to a feast. But do you know what it is for a man to join himself to my company? It is to abandon what is dearest and most vital (Luke 14:26), and to accept what is most painful the cross (Luke 14:27).

Coming to me (Luke 14:26) denotes outward attachment to Jesus; being my disciple, at the end of the verse, actual dependence on His person and Spirit. That the former may be changed into the latter, and that the bond between Jesus and the professor may be durable, there must be effected in him a painful breach with everything which is naturally dear to him. The word hate in this passage is often interpreted in the sense of loving less. Bleek quotes examples, which are not without force. Thus, Genesis 29:30-31. It is also the meaning of Matthew's paraphrase (Luke 10:37), ὁ φιλῶν... ὑπὲρ ἐμέ. Yet it is simpler to keep the natural sense of the word hate, if it offers an admissible application. And this we find when we admit that Jesus is here regarding the well-beloved ones whom He enumerates as representatives of our natural life, that life, strictly and radically selfish, which separates us from God. Hence He adds: Yea, and his own life also; this word forms the key to the understanding of the word hate. At bottom, our own life is the only thing to be hated. Everything else is to be hated only in so far as it partakes of this principle of sin and death. According to Deuteronomy 21:18-21, when a man showed himself determinedly vicious or impious, his father and mother were to be the first to take up stones to stone him. Jesus in this place only spiritualizes this precept. The words: Yea, and his own life also, thus remove from this hatred every notion of sin, and allow us to see in it nothing but an aversion of a purely moral kind.

There are not only affections to be sacrificed, bonds to be broken; there are sufferings to be undergone in the following of Jesus. The emblem of those positive evils is the cross, that punishment the most humiliating and painful of all, which had been introduced into Israel since the Roman subjugation.

Without supplying an οὐκ before ἔρχεται, we might translate: “Whosoever doth not bear..., and who nevertheless cometh after me....” But this interpretation is far from natural.

Those well-disposed crowds who were following Jesus without real conversion had never imagined anything like this. Jesus sets before their very eyes these two indispensable conditions of true faith by two parables (Luke 14:28-32).