Comparing Loves
Text: Luke 14:25-35
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When the Lord asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, as he brought his son up the mountain, it would have given every appearance that he hated the boy. We know that Abraham loved his son, and that God Himself calls Isaac, “Your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” And yet, if forced to compare his love for this long-awaited son and his love for the Lord who had given him a son (and could give him back even from death), his love for Isaac would have looked like hate.
When Isaac had sons of his own, Jacob and Esau, we hear what the Lord says of them through the prophet Malachi centuries later: “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.” And yet, we know from so many other places in Scripture that the Lord hates nothing of what He has created, including Esau, who after a tumultuous time of anger and rebellion, was eventually reconciled.
When Jacob, God’s beloved and the ancestor of the Messiah to come, married two sisters, Leah and Rachel, we read that the Lord looked upon that troubled household and “When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb,” and she would become the mother of the Messiah’s lineage. Yet Jacob did not hate Leah—he cared for her and provided for her and the children they had together, but if you were to compare his love for Leah with his love for Rachel, that lesser love would have looked like hate in comparison.
The Lord does not hate His creatures, nor does He instruct His people to hate their spouses, children, friends, or family that He gives them. This is what we must keep in mind when we hear these hard words of Jesus in our Gospel reading today, “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.” What we read in Scripture there, when it comes to this comparison of what we have toward Jesus as our God and Savior, and what we have toward our fellow creatures, is not hate as it is so widely used in our own way of speaking. But what Jesus is saying is that if two people or things are compared, the love of one will be so strong that it appears—in comparison—that the other is hated. So when it comes to Abraham, his love for Isaac will appear to be hate when compared to his love and trust in the Lord. When it comes to Jacob and Esau, the Lord will do anything to preserve the lineage of Jacob, so His love for Esau will look like hate when it’s held up to His love for Jacob. And Jacob’s love for Rachel will so eclipse his love for Leah that what he feels for Leah will appear to be hate in comparison, even though he does not hate her in the way we commonly think of it.
And this is precisely our Lord’s point this morning in this very hard sermon He preaches to the crowds. When it comes to our fear, love, and trust, what we hold for God had better be so much greater than the fear, love, and trust we give to anyone else, no matter who they are; or there will be nothing but disaster waiting for us.
This is simply because if we put more fear, love, and trust into anyone else—no matter how beautiful, good, noble, wise, or powerful they might be—we will still be sinking our faith into a mere mortal. And that’s going to end up as all mortal things end. It’s like building a tower without counting the cost, without knowing whether you have enough to complete it; so that when the foundation is laid and you’re not able to finish, everyone will know the mistake you made in putting your ultimate love and trust in a fellow child of man. It’s like a king going out to war, not first deliberating whether he’s able with ten thousand troops to meet another king coming at him with twenty thousand. You’ll be swallowed up in defeat when the limits of those people, those things, those worldly qualities that you put so much faith into, ultimately fail, as all mortals do.
These are hard words from Jesus and I’m certain that they’re grating for you to hear. They’re hard, but they are necessary because this life of faith is not easy. Walking by faith and not by sight is exceedingly difficult. We’ll have challenges from the world, throwing every obstacle it can, mocking us at every turn for putting our love and faith and hope in a Messiah that it cannot understand. We’ll have challenges from the tempter, seeking to move our faith away from the God he knows can save us toward something he knows can’t deliver us. We’ll have the second guesses and apprehensions of our fallen nature that wants to see rewards and benefits and pleasure and power now, without waiting, without trusting in what is not seen, but grasping for results that can be seen. And if we’re pouring our greatest love, faith, and hope into someone as limited, finite, and mortal as we are, that’s guaranteed disappointment and loss. It’s unfair to them to ask them to be our salvation when they can’t be that. It’s unwise of us to do, like an overzealous tower builder or a strategically foolish king at war. “Salt is good,” Jesus tells us, “but if salt has lost its taste,”—that is, if it loses the thing that makes it what it is; if a Christian loses the hope of forgiveness and resurrection by putting it all on anyone or anything other than God—“how will its saltiness be restored?” How will the hope, the faith that makes us who we are be restored?
The life of faith is not easy, so Jesus wants to make sure that we, His disciples are ready. He wants us to be in it for the long haul, to be prepared to build that tower, to know what it will cost to reach those lofty heights. He wants us to be prepared to march, knowing to how to battle our twenty thousand sins when they come against us.
The answer, of course, is Jesus. He does bear His own cross—and ours—so that we can live this life of faith. He hates His own life—not in a morose or suicidal way—but when it comes to comparing His own life to how much He loves you, it’s going to look like hate in comparison to what He feels for you, what He’s willing to do to save you. He knows exactly what it will cost to build you a tower to the heavens: it’s going to cost His life. He, the King of kings, marches out, meeting your twenty thousand sins on the field of battle and defeats them all, not with ten thousand soldiers or angels, but with one life, one death, three days in the tomb, and one glorious resurrection.
And here’s the truly marvelous thing: when love, faith, and hope are directed in the right place; when we fear, love, and trust in God above all things, that actually sets us free to love everyone else as we should. We don’t put any unfair weight on them to be our salvation or our greatest good. We receive them as gifts, as the Lord always wanted them to be. We honor and love them as we should, while we honor and love the One who gave them to us as we should. The life of faith becomes ordered and built upon love as it serves our neighbors and gives glory to our Father in heaven. Our saltiness—the thing that makes us who we are as God’s children, our faith, our hope, our love—is restored and we walk in this life as we were always meant to, toward the greater things in the life to come. In the name of Jesus, who is Love. Amen.
