I guess I can’t be a Christian because I don’t hate my parents. Why does Jesus tell us we need to hate our parents in order to be his disciple (Luke 14:26)?

Luke really does use the word 'hate,' and that verse has been used to wound people, so the question deserves a straight answer instead of a flinch. The answer is that the word is doing something in Greek that it does not do in English.

1. Luke really does say hate. 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple' (Luke 14:26). That is the text, the word is miseo, and it is not a scribal slip or a timid translator's error. Start there.

2. Love and hate means prefer. In Hebrew and Aramaic, 'loved... hated' is a standard way of saying 'chose one over the other.' God says 'Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated' (Malachi 1:2-3), meaning he chose Jacob, not that he nursed a grudge. Genesis says 'Leah was hated' (Genesis 29:31) in the same chapter where she bears Jacob four sons, which tells you what the word is doing.

3. Matthew supplies the plain meaning. The same saying appears in Matthew as 'Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me' (Matthew 10:37). Same speaker, different audience, and Matthew spells out the comparison that Luke leaves in idiom. That is not a contradiction between Gospels; it is one Gospel glossing the other.

4. Jesus uses shock deliberately. He tells hearers to tear out an eye and cut off a hand (Matthew 5:29-30) and to let the dead bury their own dead (Matthew 8:22). Nobody reads those as commands to self-mutilate or to skip funerals. Jesus' teaching is full of deliberately vivid overstatement, and his hearers knew it.

5. The same Jesus commands honor. 'For God commanded, Honor your father and your mother' (Matthew 15:4), and he condemned the religious men who used a technicality to avoid supporting their parents. He affirmed the fifth commandment and Paul repeats it for the church. A teacher who demanded literal hatred of parents would contradict himself inside the same Gospel.

6. The objection borrows Christian ethics. The outrage at hating your parents is Christian outrage. You learned that family love is owed from the same Bible you are using to indict it, which means the objection is standing on ground it has not accounted for. And if flat literalism is the rule, it also condemns the eye-gouging command, which the objector does not keep either. The standard is applied only where it is convenient.

7. The demand is total allegiance. Read Luke 14:25-33 as one unit: hate your family, carry your cross, renounce your possessions. The three sayings make a single demand, that nothing, including your dearest loves, sits above Christ. Anything placed there becomes an idol, which is why the first commandment comes first.

8. Love is reordered, not abolished. Jesus does not ask you to stop loving your mother. He asks you to love her as a disciple, which turns out to be loving her better: with truth, patience, and without treating her as God. The verse relocates your ultimate loyalty; it does not delete your affections.

9. The verse has been misused. Christians who have taken such texts as license for coldness or cruelty toward family have misread them, and the church's ethics have consistently said so. 'Whoever does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen' (1 John 4:20), and 'if anyone does not provide for his relatives... he has denied the faith' (1 Timothy 5:8).

Do you have to hate your parents? No, and the Bible forbids it. The question the verse actually asks is harder: is there anything you love more than Christ? That is the one worth sitting with.

Sources: D. A. Carson; Exegetical Fallacies; Craig Keener; Gregory Koukl; Stand to Reason.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!