"Hate your Parents" Part II: Matthew 10:37

“He Who Loves Father or Mother More Than Me…” — Matthew 10:37

Matthew 10:37 contains one of Jesus’ most defining statements about discipleship: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” This verse parallels Luke 14:26, but whereas Luke preserves the Semitic idiom of “hating” family by comparison, Matthew presents the same teaching in its interpretive form. Together, they provide a complete picture of Jesus’ demand for undivided allegiance.

Matthew 10:37 appears within Jesus’ commissioning discourse to the Twelve (Matthew 10:5–42). He prepares them for public ministry and warns them of the divisions that His message will inevitably produce. He tells them, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). The sword here is not a call to violence as some distortionists claim; it is a metaphor for the division that arises when loyalty to Christ confronts competing loyalties. Jesus foretells that a man’s enemies “will be the members of his household” (Matthew 10:36), echoing the prophetic language of Micah (Micah 7:6). The point is not hostility toward family but the unavoidable fracture that occurs when one follows Christ in a world that resists Him.

It is in this context that Jesus says: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.” The phrase “more than Me” removes any ambiguity. Jesus is not commanding hatred; He is clarifying hierarchy, focusing on allegiance and not on some base notion of emotional affection. The Greek phrase ὑπὲρ ἐμέ (hyper eme)—“more than Me”—is a direct comparative. It answers the interpretive question left open by the idiom in Luke. The two passages are both parallels and complimentary to one another: Luke 14:26 expresses the dramatic demand while Matthew 10:37 explains its meaning. When combined, the two passages show that Jesus requires His disciples to love Him above every earthly relationship, including the most intimate and culturally binding. The meaning revealed by examining these passages together reveals the necessity of interpreting Scripture holistically, instead of focusing on a verse here and a verse there that confirms what we want it to mean.

This teaching and command has a long Scriptural foundation. The first commandment is a call to exclusive devotion: “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). The Shema requires absolute priority of love: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Israel’s spiritual crises were consistently traced to divided loyalties, whether toward foreign gods, political powers, or human traditions (1 Kings 18:21; Jeremiah 2:13; Hosea 10:2). Jesus continues this theme by demanding that His disciples give Him the singular devotion that belongs to God alone. In Matthew 10:37, He applies Deuteronomy 6:5 not only to the Father but to Himself, thereby identifying Himself with the God who demands and deserves undivided love. On three occasions recorded in three Gospels, Christ teaches us the Great Commandment: to love God above all else, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Matthew 22:35–40; Mark 12:28–34, Luke 10:25–28). This commandment is the foundation not just of morality and ethics, but on living a life rightly ordered towards God.

It is significant that Jesus identifies family as a potential rival love. In Israel, family loyalty was one of the strongest obligations in social life, reinforced by the command to honor father and mother (Exodus 20:12) and by the covenant structure of households (Genesis 17:7). Jesus never abolishes these responsibilities. He rebukes the Pharisees for using religious tradition to evade care for parents (Matthew 15:3–6). He fulfills and upholds the ethical core of the command to honor one’s parents. Yet He also reveals the higher truth behind the command: God alone defines the proper order of loves. When family demands unconditional allegiance, they are stepping into a place that belongs only to Him. When a spouse requires allegiance above God, he or she likewise attempts to usurp that which belongs only to God.

The phrase “is not worthy of Me” underscores this. Worthiness in Matthew is not about human merit but about alignment of loyalty. Jesus is not saying a person must perform certain acts to earn His acceptance. He is stating that discipleship is incompatible with competing authorities. To attempt to follow Christ while giving supreme allegiance to family is a contradiction in terms. A disciple is defined by the primacy of devotion to the Master, Jesus Christ.

Jesus broadens the point by adding, “and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” This intensifies the claim. Parental love is perhaps the strongest natural affection, yet even this love must be subordinate to Christ. Scripture affirms that a parent’s love is a reflection of God’s own love (Psalm 103:13). But reflections must never replace their source. The danger Jesus identifies is the perennial human tendency to elevate a good and God-given relationship to a place of ultimate authority. When this happens, love becomes disordered. Matthew 10:37 calls the disciple back to the source of all true love.

The surrounding verses strengthen the argument. Immediately after this teaching, Jesus says, “He who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:38). The cross symbolizes death to self-rule. It is the execution of divided allegiance. Only when Christ becomes the supreme love can one “lose his life for My sake” and thereby “find it” (Matthew 10:39). The logic is consistent: discipleship demands a reordering of every affection and authority, including the love of self. Just as parenthood requires us to subordinate our needs to those of our children, discipleship in Christ requires a reordering of our own importance.

When read together with Luke 14:26, Matthew 10:37 provides the clearest possible interpretation of Jesus’ intent. Luke’s dramatic idiom (“hate father and mother”) is not literal hostility, for it would contradict the consistent ethical teaching of Scripture (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 19:19; Ephesians 6:1–3). Matthew offers the precise meaning: “love less than Me,” “place beneath Me,” “refuse to elevate above Me.” Jesus is describing the absolute primacy of His own lordship.

In sum, Matthew 10:37 teaches that discipleship is fundamentally a matter of ordered love. To love Christ above all is not to diminish love for others but to purify and anchor it. Love that is rooted in Christ becomes rightly ordered, free from idolatry, and capable of reflecting God’s character. To elevate family above Christ is to invert the created order, just as loving Christ first restores it. This is the heart of His call and the foundation of His kingdom, the Greatest Commandment from which all good things finds its source.

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When we hold Luke 14:26 and Matthew 10:37 together, the picture that emerges is not of a harsh Messiah demanding emotional severance, but of a wise and truthful Lord revealing the reality of the human heart. No one can follow Christ while holding a rival center of gravity. No one can be shaped by the life of the kingdom while still grounded in the expectations, fears, or demands of any earthly authority. Discipleship is not merely a matter of belief but of ordered love, where Christ claims the first place not by coercion but by the sheer truth of who He is. He is the source of life, the ground of being, the One through whom all good affections find their proper shape. Thus He says, without apology, that all must be subordinated to Him.

In real terms, this does not begin with dramatic decisions but with honest examination. Every believer must wrestle with the question: What do I love more than Christ? The answer is rarely stated aloud, yet it appears in the reflexive patterns of the heart—the hesitation to obey when obedience costs us something; the fear of losing the approval of those closest to us; the quiet instinct to avoid conflict even when truth demands it; the subtle way comfort becomes an idol, and the self becomes a quiet tyrant. Jesus’ words expose these inner tendencies not to shame us but to liberate us. When anything other than Christ becomes the highest love, the heart becomes divided, anxious, and disordered. But when Christ is enthroned as the first and highest love, everything else moves into its proper place.

This ordering is not abstract. Scripture is clear that discipleship inevitably creates tension in relationships, because the world operates on an entirely different logic of loyalty. Jesus warns in Matthew 10:34–36 that allegiance to Him will sometimes bring division even within one’s household, not because He delights in division but because truth is inherently disruptive to systems built on fear, pride, or tradition. Even the best earthly relationships can become places where the cost of discipleship is felt. When a parent disapproves of your obedience to Christ, when a spouse is threatened by your devotion, when friends attempt to pull you back into old patterns—these are not merely social challenges but also spiritual tests. Jesus’ call in Matthew 10:37 becomes real precisely in these moments where tension and potential consequences emerge. The disciple must love Christ more, not with cold detachment or as a form of social or familial rebellion, but with warm, inward faith. The priority of Christ becomes the compass by which every relational decision is made.

At the same time, Christ’s call protects families and relationships from a deeper danger—that of being elevated into the place of God. When a person’s identity is built on the approval of parents, or the affection of a spouse, or the success of children, those relationships are burdened with a weight they cannot bear. Idolatry destroys what it tries to preserve. But when Christ is first, the believer is freed to love others without fear or possessiveness. Love becomes patient rather than controlling, self-giving rather than self-seeking, rooted in the eternal rather than the fragile. Christ does not diminish love, but rather He purifies it, restoring it to its proper design. In this way, ordered love becomes a blessing to every relationship touched by it.

The division motif applies with even greater impact to the body of believers, the real church (ecclesia). Often times, division over human tradition is confused as religious or spiritual division. Doubtless we can all relate to some extent or another where religious tension has formed a wedge between friends, family, and loved ones. In some cases, allegiance to Christ causes a rift between the faithful believer and the atheist, often invoking the wrath hidden in a secular heart. However, there are explicit, anti-Christological movements within Christianity itself, sowing division and distorting the Word, often while claiming to be the “true” form of the church—that is, the ecclesia, the whole assembly of the faithful who have confessed the nature of Jesus as Christ, God’s Son, Savior (ἸΧΘΥΣ). Often it is these divisions that are the most brutal, but we must understand that in virtually every instance it is not allegiance to God that causes this tension, but allegiance to the true Word of God. When man elevates tradition and human theological invention as equal or greater than Scripture, that invites chaos and conflict without end. Christ is no longer the compass, but the flippant and fluid theories of theologian-philosophers. Those involved often think their disagreement is over Scripture, or God, but it is not; it is rooted in the idolatrous elevation of human tradition above or equal to Christ, a violation of the Greatest Commandment.

Furthermore, the reordering Christ demands is not merely relational but existential. Luke 14:26 exposes the deepest rival of all: the self. Even if no family member resists our discipleship, even if no relationship becomes a battleground of loyalty, the self remains the last frontier where Christ must reign. “Even his own life,” Jesus says. This includes one’s desires, ambitions, comforts, reputations, and securities. Nothing that defines our identity can remain unyielded. That is why Jesus pairs the reordering of love with the imagery of the cross (Luke 9:23; Matthew 10:38). The cross is not an ornament but a symbol of death, specifically the death of the self as ultimate authority. To bear the cross is to acknowledge that Christ determines the meaning of our lives, not the impulse of the moment or the collection of our preferences. Just as Jesus surrendered his physical self on Cavalry, we too must sacrifice our natural, self-centered tendences and embrace His example.

This is a glaring requirement in a society utterly consumed with self-love to the point of rejecting marriage and parenthood (and what an epidemic of disordered chaos and loneliness that has brought to these generations). Where TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and others glorify the self—or rather, the polished version of the self we choose to show the world—God calls us to subordinate the self to Him. In an ordered life, the love of self is beneath the love of God, Children, and Spouse, providing a sense of fulfilment and immunizing us from the temptation of self-glory in a society utterly consumed with it.

In pastoral terms, the disciple’s path becomes one of continual surrender where each act of obedience actually increases freedom. Each surrendered loyalty removes a weight from the soul. Each confession of Christ’s primacy breaks another chain. Each step into obedience strengthens the inner life. The believer does not lose himself in this surrender; he finds his true self in Christ, just as Jesus promises that the one who “loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). While it is easy to view this as a promise of future hope, the reality is that this effect is a present reality for those who faithfully follow Him. The more fully Christ becomes the center, the more ordered, stable, and peaceful the entire life becomes. For this reason alone, a religious foundation improves quality of life and peace to the point where it can be measured in terms of biology; those who are faithful tend to live longer, have less health issues, have happier marriages and children, and are simply happier in a general sense. Faith and spirituality gift us in myriad ways, and our inward peace and love manifests itself biologically, an outward sign of inward transformation so dramatic that it can be measured and categorized.

It is important to understand that the combined witness of Luke 14:26 and Matthew 10:37 is not a call to emotional violence or relational neglect. God does not call us to reject our spouse or children, but to strengthen our love for them through Him. This is an invitation to us from God into the freedom of a single, unbroken allegiance. Christ calls His followers to a love that is purified from idolatry, liberated from fear, and reoriented toward the One who alone is worthy. To be His disciple is to allow Him to reorder the heart, sanctify desire, and anchor the entire life in His person. While some might misconstrue this surrender as a burden, in truth it is one of the greatest joys of discipleship. A central, core love of God is the root where all good works, peace, joy, and love find nourishment and growth. When Christ is first, everything else falls into place—not always easily, not without cost, but always in accordance with truth, goodness, and life. He demands everything only because He is everything. His call is not merely to follow Him, but to love Him above all, that all other loves may finally become what they were intended to be.