Do You Love to Hate?

In the space where fear once lived, love enters to replace it. The kingdom of God contains only love. Anything that falls short of this ideal hasn’t been fully transformed. In Jesus’s eyes, the everyday world feebly reflects divine love. This holds the key to one of his most disturbing teachings:

If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.

Jesus seems to be ordering his disciples to abandon every cherished relationship, yet this makes no sense from a teacher who also commands them to love their enemies.

Jesus speaks in absolutes to catch his listener’s attention, and here he is making the sharpest possible distinction between ordinary love and divine love. “Me” stands for God, and “coming to Me” means entering the Kingdom of God, which is to say, God’s reality. That reality isn’t physical; it isn’t found in worldly relationships, even the most loving ones. If you want to know divine love, you must find it on its own terms, not the terms you are used to.

Even when phrased more softly, this is a radical teaching. A person doesn’t start with everyday love and then direct that feeling toward God. A complete reversal of perception is necessary – to dramatize this reversal, Jesus turns the word love into hate.

The mystical Jesus regards the entire world as an illusion, which would make the love we experience here also an illusion. Now the word hate becomes understandable: Jesus is warning us off the kind of unreal love that lulls us, blinding us to God’s love.

Adapted from The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2008).

Read more: Spirit, Deepak Chopra's Tips, disciple, divine, hate, ideal, Jesus, love

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Jane B.

8:42PM PST on Jan 27, 2012

I don't but Jesus Freaks do.

send a green star

Lara K.

2:43AM PST on Jan 27, 2012

I don't think I really hate or love anything. I know in my gut that the world is an illusion, but how can you love or, conversely, hate an illusion?

Past Member .

2:14PM PDT on Sep 29, 2010

I don't know that I really hate anyone any longer. There are some I don't care for a great deal, but I don't hate them. The kind of love that religion and Jesus taught is selfless, God given love. When that is our focus, the feelings are joyous. Hate is destructive, takes a lot of energy to maintain and doesn't uplift us as love does. Besides, I try to understand the teachings in the Bible remembering that the books in the Bible were chosen by religious men about 2000 years ago, in a much different time, and these men were appointed by a pagan Roman emperor. The mysteries of the Bible? Yes, and a few books could have been left out too. Some things I won't understand in this life and that's ok too.

Debbie W.

9:27PM PDT on Sep 26, 2010

That's also why we're always at war with something or someone ... no peace. Looking for it from the outside is not what's needed ... it's something that must first be gained on the inside and, once gained, can work itself outward to accomplish good things.

KATE H.

3:25AM PDT on Sep 23, 2010

Wow, awesome thankyou :)

Saryn G.

12:02AM PDT on Sep 23, 2010

=/... Didn't think this would be a religious post.

Dianne D.

6:45PM PDT on Sep 22, 2010

Good points Bob C. I didn't know what to think of this article, but you made sense. You get a green star for that.

Diana C.

2:37PM PDT on Sep 22, 2010

Uh??!!

Camilla V.

6:16AM PDT on Sep 21, 2010

hmm interesting I think I love to hate my work, and my life at times

Uma C.

11:44AM PDT on Sep 20, 2010

Bob that's so succinctly put. Let me add this: We have all had the experience of ourselves or someone we know being so "high" that we/ they just absolutely love the whole world, everything and everybody. Then we we start to "come down" the energy become murkier with the descent until, depending on how "low " we plummet, our experienced "reality" becomes more and more narrow and we are caught in issues about trust and worthiness of the love we have to give. When we are "high" we are in a place in our consciousness where we are vibrating very rapidly. High means rate of vibration as in the high notes produced by the fastest vibration of a string on an instrument and low means the same to the opposite. Reflect on what makes you feel high and low and you will see that it is a subjective experience having nothing to do with the actual state of the world around us but only with our personal vibratory rate at the moment. This awareness might lead one to conclude that our blaming the objects of our hatred has nothing to do with them but rather what state we ourselves are in. It makes it easier to choose the "high road" in any circumstance and thus put forth the energy we want to be in the world instead of being swamped in reactive negativity, always a slave to what we imagine we experience caught in a "downward" spiral of fear and reprisal.