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YOUR GIRLFRIEND OR GOD: TAKE YOUR PICK

He was a tough guy, and he faced a tough decision. Maybe you remember. It’s a dark and stormy night, and up on the airport TV flight monitor, the dreaded word “CANCELED” is popping up everywhere. Long lines are forming at ticket counters as exhausted business travelers try to make alternate plans. And this one important man hears the bad news from the lady at the counter: “I’m sorry, sir, but your flight’s just been wiped out.”

“What else have you got?” he asks her, glancing nervously at his watch.” “Well,” she says, “there’s one more plane going out tonight, leaving in half an hour. But” — and she hits a few keys — “I only have one seat left and it’s in first class.”

He doesn’t hesitate. “I’ll take it.” And without any fuss, he whips out his AMERICAN EXPRESS GOLD CARD! The television commercial fades to a picture of this same man climbing over people to get to an empty seat next to his wife in a crowded school auditorium. It’s the gala night of his daughter’s big school play, you see. Third grade. And she’s dressed up as a tree in the forest, or the tooth fairy, or whatever. And she sees her daddy, who got to the school with 30 seconds to spare, thanks to his $10,000 credit limit. And he gives her a little wave. “American Express. Don’t Leave Home Without It.”

Isn’t that nice? A month later the bill comes for that one-way, first-class, no-advance-purchase ticket, and it costs the guy $985 plus a nonrefundable airport surcharge of eleven bucks, but he put his family first and got to the theater on time.

But you know something? Here in this old advertising manual called Holy Bible, which has quite a number of memorable soundbites of its own, Jesus seems to take almost the opposite theological stance. We’ve been studying the hard sayings of Christ — the ones that need a 21st-century spin doctor to explain away — and we wonder here: “What would He say to the guy who pays through the nose to get to his eight-year-old kid’s school play?”

In Luke 14:26, 27, we find one of Jesus’ strangest expressions. A large crowd is following Him around, and He abruptly turns around and says to them:

“If anyone comes to Me and does not HATE his father and mother, his wife AND CHILDREN, his brothers and sisters — he cannot be My disciple. And anyone who does not carry the cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple.”

And there you have it. “If you love Me,” Jesus seems to be saying, “if you want to serve Me and follow Me, then you have to turn around and hate your own family. It’s Me . . . or them. Take your choice. But you can’t love Me and your mommy both.”

Just a few pages earlier, in Luke 8, Jesus seems to take this seemingly callous, unfeeling theology and apply it to Himself too. He was teaching in a large house, with lots of followers and devotees gathered around. The place was packed. And here’s how Luke tells it:

“Now Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see Him, but they were not able to get near Him because of the crowd. Someone told Him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, waiting to see you.’”

Now, that should be great news. Jesus has been on the road, sleeping under trees, living hand to mouth, with no place to lay His head. Away from His family. And now He hears that Mom is standing just outside the front gate. What should a good son do? Well, stop the sermon right there! Cut a path through the crowd and go give her a big hug. If she’s across town at the Holiday Inn, you cancel the rest of the meeting, get out your American Express card and speed in a taxi over to see her. “Mom, how are you? How’s Dad doing? How’s his rheumatism?” That kind of thing.

But what does Jesus do, hearing that His family is waiting at the front door? Here’s His answer in verse 31:

“He replied, ‘MY mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.”

Over in Matthew’s telling of the story, and in the fresh new Message paraphrase, Jesus says this:

“‘Right here, right in front of you — My mother and My brothers. Obedience is thicker than blood. The person who obeys God’s will is My brother and sister and mother.’”

And we suddenly remember how — as also told here in Luke — Jesus, even as a 12-year-old boy, looked right into the eyes of Joseph and said, essentially, “I have another Father . . . and I have to be about HIS business first. Sorry, Dad.”

In her popular “Christian fiction” work, Three From Galilee, author Marjorie Holmes tries to imagine what it must have felt like for Mary to get the word as it filtered back through the crowd to the front porch. “You say you’re His mother, lady? He just said His mother was inside, that His mother was anyone who does God’s will.” And with hot, painful tears of misunderstanding and confusion, she trudges back out to the street and goes home again.

What do we make of these hard teachings? Today, when a teenager dumps his family and follows a spiritual teacher to a commune in the hills, we assume they’ve fallen victim to a brainwashing cult. We mentioned the Heaven’s Gate group the other day. A 72-year-old lady named Jackie Leonard had two daughters and a son. She was a GRANDMA, with grandchildren who loved and adored her. And she left them all to follow Marshall Herff Applewhite to the mass grave in Rancho Santa Fe. So is Jesus really teaching us here to hate our parents and our kids?

Well, we have to be wise in our studying, don’t we? Some of you are already remembering that Jesus Himself, this same Teacher, instructed His followers that it was a SIN to hate, that hate was equivalent to murder. So we have to gently synthesize these two seemingly opposite ideas.

The Adventist commentary for Luke gives us this rejoinder:

“Scripture usage makes it clear that this is not ‘hate’ in the usual sense of the word. In the Bible, ‘to hate’ often should be understood simply as a typical Oriental hyperbole meaning ‘to love less.’” Deuteronomy 21 has an example of this, a man with two wives. The scholars continue: “This fact stands forth clearly in the parallel passage where Jesus says, ‘He that loveth father and mother MORE than Me is not worthy of Me.’” That’s Matthew 10:37. “This striking hyperbole is apparently used to make vivid to the follower of Christ the fact that at all times he must make first in his life the kingdom of heaven. Again, in regard to material possessions, the governing principle is a matter of what we make first in life.”

And what Jesus is telling us here — the same Jesus who went home and was obedient to His mom, the same Jesus who, on the cross, with His dying breath, made provision for His mother’s welfare and protection, the same Jesus who intensely loved all people, including His enemies — is simply that God’s kingdom must come first. Whatever that means. We must love God first, and Mom and Dad and spouse and kids second, right behind that. We spend our best dollars advancing God’s kingdom, and our second-priority dollars flying across the country to our kid’s school play.

Jerry Kramer, former football great with the Green Bay Packers, tells how Coach Vince Lombardi had a sign posted up in the locker room:

“What you say here, what you see here, what you hear here, let it stay here when you leave here.”

“If there are injuries on the team,” Lombardi told his players, “you keep your mouth shut. You’re loyal to the team. YOU DON’T EVEN TELL YOUR WIFE. When we’re driving toward the Super Bowl, that comes first.”

In the Tyndale commentary for Luke, Leon Morris writes:

“Discipleship means giving one’s first loyalty. There is no place in Jesus’ teaching for LITERAL hatred. . . . Jesus’ meaning is surely that the love the disciple has for HIM must be so great that the best of earthly loves is hatred by comparison. The listing of the nearest and dearest spells this out with solemnity. A man must not set store even by his own life.” That’s John 12:25. “Devotion to Christ cannot be anything less than whole-hearted.”

We read in the Bible that even Jesus’ own brothers didn’t really believe in Jesus’ divine ministry. It says so in John 7. They taunted Him – also in John 7. They accused Him of being out of His mind — that’s in Mark 3. And here in this crowded house, Jesus does gently affirm that His relationship with fellow citizens of God’s kingdom, with those who HAVE embraced heaven’s government . . . yes, it IS closer than even what Jesus experienced with the boys He sat around the supper table next to as a kid growing up in Nazareth.

I’ll tell you — it takes prayer and wisdom to do it right, friend. There’s many a story where a son or daughter or husband or wife had to put Christ ahead of their closest and tenderest ties, had to go to a church to be baptized, knowing that an angry set of parents were back home plotting retaliation or even death. And the good Christian convert still does love that confused, angry parent. But they do love God MORE. They always love God MOST. That’s the formula.

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