Memorial of Saint Charles Borromeo, Bishop

People struggle with the line in today’s Gospel about hating father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even our own life. Without that, Jesus says, we cannot be his disciples. And he does use the word for hate. This is not a translation issue. He uses the proper term.

But I think the key lies in that phrase, “hate his own life.” If we take “hate” in its ordinary sense, then his commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” becomes incoherent. If I hate myself, then I get to hate my neighbor. That undermines the point of what he is saying.

So hate here must be serving a different function. I think he is telling us to hate what our life has become because of sin and death. We must hate this life as it is. The same applies to our family relationships: we hate that life comes about only through pain and inevitably ends in death. We hate these things.

Think of true poverty. If you saw someone struggling to survive, someone suffering real poverty rather than simply lacking comforts, and you did not hate that, you would not be a Christian. You should hate what you see. You do not hate the person who is poor; you hate the situation itself. And that moves you to act.

In the same way, if we do not hate what this life has become because of sin and death, if we do not hate those consequences and what they do to us, then we will not find the motivation to seek authentic life.

The same is true of our family relationships. You do not hate your mother for being your mother. You hate that the relationship will be fraught with pain and suffering when it was meant to be better. It was meant to be something other than what it is. And that is true of every relationship in our lives.

Our relationships were meant to be good and easy and perfect, to build us all up. Yet so often they tear us down, and being good and holy becomes a great struggle. That is what we are meant to hate in this life. And that can motivate us. It can give us the drive and desire to seek what is truly good and to recognize our need for God himself.

So we must see the bad things in this world and truly hate them. We must push against them. We must desire their destruction so that we can seek what is authentically good. There is, then, an aspect of hate within the Christian life.

God himself says in the Old Testament, “I hate divorce.” He also speaks of hating death. He hates the evils of this world, and we are meant to imitate him in that so that we may seek what is good all the more.

We must find within ourselves that ability to truly hate what is evil. Too often, I think, we default to a kind of apathy. “It is what it is,” we say, and we do not worry about it.

We should hate evil in the sense that we oppose it and push against it, constantly striving for what is good and bringing more of that good into the world. At the same time, we recognize that we must still wait on God himself to bring all of that work to completion and to give us the life we truly desire.