Sermon: First Sunday of the Fall Term
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 7, 2025)
There's an important theologian, maybe the most important, at least in the Christian West, named Augustine. He's very influential. The current Pope, in addition to being a White Sox fan, is an Augustinian. And in Augustine's guidance, in interpreting scripture, when you interpret scripture, he says, "God is love." So every word of the scripture means love. If you don't see it at first glance, keep interpreting. Some weeks that is harder than others. Jesus turns to the crowds and says, "Whoever does not hate, whoever does not hate mother and father, brother and sister, spouse, and children, cannot be my disciple."
Now we have some good reasons not to take Jesus literally when he says this. Jesus' own Jewish tradition, one of the top 10 Commandments, is honor thy father and mother. And even more so, just two chapters ago, he had this exchange with a lawyer, and a lawyer comes to him and says, "What are the most important commandments?" And Jesus says, "There are two. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself." This is absolutely faithful to his own tradition. He is drawing these teachings out of the Hebrew Bible, and he and the lawyer agree that this is the core and the fulfillment of the law. Love is the law.
And so Jesus says, "Hate mother and father, hate children, hate brother and sister, hate your spouse." We can't take him literally, but are we allowed to ignore it? To borrow a phrase used in a very different and unhappy context, we might not take him literally, but we have to take him seriously. Jesus is trying to tell us something about love, and in fact, it sounds like he's trying to get our attention. He's trying to shake up our expectations of what love is by using this word, by using the language of hate. But not hate exactly. I'm going to retreat into the Greek here for some help. The word, which is translated as “hate” here, is the Greek verb “miseō,” which I admit does mean “hate.” It can mean despise or, but it can also be used in a different sense where despising or detesting is not what's at stake.
In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, that would've been current in Jesus' time that many Jewish people were using, it says that Jacob hated Leah in the Book of Genesis or in the Prophets, God says, "Jacob, have I loved? Esau have I hated?" But Genesis also says that Esau was blessed. So there's a different sense of the word hate used for rhetorical purposes, which doesn't mean I despise. It means to love less than. It's a comparative. I prefer something else. Maybe this is more palatable. Whoever does not love mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or child less than, but if it's a comparative, what's the comparison? Less than what?
If you were here last week? You know there's a context for this lesson. This lesson immediately follows what I preached upon last week, and what Jesus ended with last week was a parable about a wedding banquet. And Jesus says, "When you throw a big wedding banquet, don't invite your friends or your closest family. Invite people off the street, the people who need it most." This is a clue. But actually, I think there's a deeper context here, and it reaches back two chapters ago to chapter 10 when Jesus is asked this question about the law, and he confirms an agreement with his brother in faith that love is the law. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself.
Now, this was an important teaching because you can think about our ethical obligations to other people a couple of ways, and the dominant way to think about our ethical obligations to other people at the time was that I owe you something based upon my relationship to you. If you are a man, and I am not, if you are a slave and I am not, that's going to change what we owe one another. But the Hebrew prophets and then Jesus behind in their wake, in their aftermath says, "It has nothing to do with social roles. Your neighbor, the word neighbor here means just the one next to you." Physical proximity is the question. Love that one that much, whatever their social category. And then the lawyer follows up because there's a question, "Okay, well, how close is close enough? Who's my neighbor?" And then Jesus offers the Parable of the good Samaritan. The Parable of the Good Samaritan shows up in our schedule of readings every summer. I'm not here in the summer, so I'm going to take some sermonic license and talk to you about that parable for a second.
"How close is close enough? What makes a good neighbor?" The lawyer says. And then Jesus tells this story, and it's probably a familiar one to you. He says, "There's a Judean who's walking down... A Jewish person who's walking down a dangerous road, and he's beaten and left for dead, and then a member of the priestly class comes by, and when he sees him, he crosses to the other side of the road and doesn't help him. And a priest comes by in fancy robes like me, and he sees this man beaten, and he crosses to the other side, puts distance between him and the other man. Gets away from him and doesn't help him."
"And then a Samaritan comes, hated enemy, who had his own place to go, his own people at home, and he does the opposite. He crosses the street to approach the beaten man, and he cares for him and nurses him and spends his own money that was meant for his own people, his own family. He spends it on the beaten Jewish man. That's being a neighbor." Jesus says. "You have to get close to suffering. Don't turn away from it. Turn toward it." It's hard to overemphasize the level of antagonism between the Samaritans and the Jewish people at this time. A good analogy would be sort of Catholics and Protestants during the troubles–very close, but also because so close, deeply divided.
So it's not just that the Samaritan crosses the road. He crosses all kinds of boundaries, religious boundaries, ethnic boundaries, national boundaries, and places the needs of his needy enemy first. And then we turn to this parable of the wedding banquet, where we invite those who are needy off the street. It's important to name that these distinctions, especially these national distinctions, these ethnic distinctions are deeply tied to the sense of family and patriarchy. But the way these tribes, the way these nations are outlined and divided, have to do with whose father was, whose father was, whose father was, whose father. Father and their offspring separating out into tribes and nations. Jesus is critiquing this in this moment. He's critiquing fealty to nation, critiquing fealty to fatherland, critiquing fealty to patriarchal tribalism. He is saying, "Don't just love your own. Don't just love those who are closest to you. Love everybody. Make those who are in need, get close to them so they can be your neighbor. Love everybody."
How do we do that? The scandal and the difficulty of this teaching, as Jesus says, "Hate mother and father, children and spouse, brother and sister." And I don't, and there just isn't a world in which I'm going to feel about my neighbor or my enemy the way I feel about them, but I don't think that's what Jesus is asking us, and this is where I think he's doing something really important and trying to tell us something about the nature of love. Because Christian Love, the kind of love Jesus talks about in these Gospels. Christian Love is not a feeling. We have this muddying of the emotional and the physical. Christian Love is not a feeling or not just a feeling, it is obligation and it is action. When Jesus says, "Love your neighbor," he doesn't mean feel in your heart about your neighbor who may be kind of irritating or annoying. Feel in your heart about that person the same as you feel about the people who are closest to you. He's saying, "Treat that person the way you would treat those who are closest to you."
When Jesus says, "Love your enemy," he doesn't mean feel in your heart, empathy, or love or affection. Instead of the hatred you might actually feel, he says, "Treat that person as if they were beloved of God because they are." What Jesus wants us to do is refract the world, not through our feelings for the world, but through God's. Because God loves the starving Gazan child as much as God loves my child. God loves the Israeli family hiding in a bunker or waiting for a hostage to come home as much as God loves my family. God loves the Ukrainian freedom fighter. God also loves the Russian conscript as much as God loves my brother serving in the Navy. God loves the migrant and the prisoner and the detainee and the unhoused here in our community. God loves the trans kid who is looking for gender-affirming care, where it's being refused. God loves all of them. God loves them just as much as God loves anybody else.
But in the same way that I might leave two of my beloved children behind on a beach to run out and rescue one who was in the sea drowning. The same way the Samaritan turns away from his people at home and turns toward his needy enemy on the dangerous road, God turns towards those who are suffering first. God loves them and puts God's attention there. God turns towards them because they are beloved and because they are in need. The question for us then is, where do we turn? Where do we turn our attention? This is the wedding parable. Who are you inviting to your celebration? If the Greek word miseō, here translated as “hate,” is about comparison, this is the comparison Jesus is drawing. It's the good Samaritan stopping to nurse his enemy, not because he doesn't love his own, but because God loves that beaten, broken man. It's the love of God crying out in our world, justice for the poor and the oppressed.
This is hard. I actually think the implications of this teaching are harder than the language of it, than the rhetoric of it. It's why Jesus spends most of this passage talking about what this will cost. I think especially when things feel unsafe, we're inclined to turn inward to protect our own, but love like this, in times like these, means taking some risks, bearing some crosses, acting on behalf of strangers and outcasts and undesirables. This can be frightening and precarious, but it would be folly to believe that the alternative is not costly.
If you want to know what it costs, look around. We are becoming overrun by brutalities, nationalisms, and factionisms. So many of us have so many good reasons to be afraid to turn away and to turn inward, to bar the doors and batten down the hatches, and I don't begrudge anybody their safety. If you need to take care, hide, run away. Let us know how we can help you. But the irony is, if that's all any of us do, if all of us only turn inward and only protect our own, we will become exactly as isolated and divided as they want us to be, as they need us to be. As their vision of this world, God's world threatens to be. The alternative, our alternative, is to love across and beyond those boundaries. To risk caring for strangers, to bear one another's crosses as signs of the new life we have been promised. The only alternative, in other words, is for us to become at last, the church.