Count the cost, take up your cross, and follow Christ. This is the basic invitation embedded in all the difficult language about hating family.
It is hard language, but the Church has always read this as rabbinical hyperbole. The Lord doesn’t actually want you to hate your family; he wants you to love your family. But he does want to make clear, as he does in other ways elsewhere, that love for our family is not the central purpose of life, and that the goods of family life should not be placed higher than the goods of divine life. Christ follows this example himself, according to St. Ambrose, when elsewhere he asks, “Who is my mother? Who are my brethren?” (Matt. 12:46). We know quite well that the Lord loves his Mother, but he emphasizes that this love’s stability depends not merely on a natural relationship, but on the mutual love that he and his mother share for the will of God.
Many martyrs of the early Church, as well as modern martyrs in other parts of the world, have faced this stark point of decision, where following Jesus means being rejected by family or friends. There is good reason that several commentators on this passage reference Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “cheap grace.” Though Bonhoeffer is a Protestant, he criticizes the way that the idea of “salvation by faith alone” can allow “forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession” (The Cost of Discipleship).
Though Catholics do not believe in “salvation by faith alone,” multiple versions of this easy grace pervade in mainstream modern Catholicism. Sometimes it hides within a more “progressive” emphasis on Catholic social teaching and matters of justice, suggesting that we don’t need to offer focus on personal repentance, faith, and relationship with Jesus as much as we need to work for economic and political change. Sometimes it hides under a more “conservative” emphasis on Catholic doctrine, suggesting that if we offer reverent worship and orthodox teaching, we don’t need to worry about doing hard things out in the world. Both of those are caricatures to a certain extent, but they’re meant to say how hard it is to really live as disciples when so many forces, both within and without the Church, push us to take the easy way, the way of cheap grace, which is really no grace at all.
How, after all, can we hear the call to “follow” Christ without equating this call with the invitation of the latest “influencer,” pop psychologist, fitness guru, or outrage farmer, to “follow” his channel? To follow someone now means a single click or tap, a sort of informal contract that allows his “content” to enter the algorithm more regularly. If we don’t like it, we can always unfollow him or instruct the algorithm to show his content less often. You can, in some cases, be “following” someone even while you have blocked everything he wants to share with you.
It seems that, in point of fact, the majority of American Catholics treat their relationship with Christ and his Church in this way. Sure, some of them will “unfollow” the Church by actively rejecting their baptism or joining some sect, but most people don’t feel any need to do anything so drastic. This widespread idea that you can continue to “follow” Jesus without actually doing anything has to be one of the devil’s favorite concepts.
So this is the landscape where Christ’s warnings about family can be translated. Following him is not just another thing you do alongside following your favorite football team, your favorite shoe brand, and your favorite podcaster. Following him has to mean you’re covered in the dust from his feet; it has to mean you’re so close that you start to love the things that he loves and hate the things that he hates, so close that his suffering starts to become part of you and your relationship with the world.
This is why St. Paul confronts his disciple Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus. Following Jesus means that he can no longer hold this man as a slave. Yes, there is a cost to that, a cost that would have seemed unacceptable in mainstream Greco-Roman culture. But it is a necessary cost that comes from following Jesus.
There are some modern readers who get annoyed because Paul doesn’t come right out and condemn slavery in a general way, as modern Christians finally began to do in the nineteenth century. And it’s fine to be annoyed at the slow work of history, or in the way that Christians have often dragged their feet about things that seem obvious to us. Though I suspect that we often drag our feet about things that would have seemed rather obvious in a different age! Anyway, this letter was never a systematic moral treatise; it was a direct and personal directive. It would have cost nothing for Paul to speak in some abstract way about the evils of slavery. What was costly was the direct personal appeal, founded in relationship. You, he says, belong to Christ now, so your life must be different. That made much more of a difference to Onesimus than a general appeal to principles.
If we can just stick with that topic for a moment, it serves as a useful example. I don’t know any modern Christian who would think it okay to own slaves. This is good, I think, but it isn’t especially praiseworthy, because it is not as if you have to make great sacrifices to be against slaveholding in the twenty-first century. So we can pat ourselves on the back about our moral uprightness in things like this: the fact that we don’t own slaves, or the fact that we avoid murdering babies, or maybe even the fact that we avoid voting for politicians who are in favor of murdering babies. Great! And maybe sometimes these views may be unpopular, so we risk here and there some social alienation. Maybe it is even hard.
But some of us who hold to these standards may find it very hard to get to Mass every week, or to follow the Church’s discipline of fasting, or to boldly preach the gospel to our neighbors, or to truly support the needs of the Church from our substance and not just from our excess. These are the places where ordinary Catholics often fail to count the cost, the places where we have convinced ourselves that grace is easy, that we can follow Christ but ignore what he says when it seems convenient.
To be sure, the Lord has great mercy for our weakness, and we will often stumble and fall. But these falls should be while carrying our cross, attempting to follow our Lord. If we never even pick it up or move, because we don’t think we have to, or because somehow we think we are entitled to salvation, we will have chosen the way of death. Choose then the way of life, and the way of wisdom, which is the way of the cross.