Using Jesus’ Words for Extreme Purposes

It’s a Jesus saying almost never heard in a Sunday church service, but it has long been a favorite of cult leaders, giving biblical authority to their commands that followers sever family ties.

The biblical verse, Luke 14:26, was most recently used in an essay on the Internet from the non-Christian cult called Heaven’s Gate, before 39 members committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe.

Speaking to his disciples in Luke, Jesus says: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

The eclectic cult called Heaven’s Gate, and Internet readers, were told by leader Marshall Applewhite that Christians present a “counterfeit” Jesus when they say he preached family values and peace on Earth.

“A true seeker who really wants to know what Jesus required of His disciples in order to go with Him into His Father’s kingdom would read what JESUS SAID,” Applewhite wrote in an essay posted on the Internet. He then cited Luke 14:26 and John 12:44-50, the latter a saying attributed to Jesus that also demands trust and loyalty.

Biblical scholars and church pastors say the admonition was typical of Jesus’ sometimes stark overstatement to make a point, such as “Let the dead bury the dead” or plucking out the eye that offends you.

“You have to balance those verses with the fullness of the Gospel to include other verses that speak to honoring family relationships,” said the Rev. Chris Stanton of the Church on the Way in Van Nuys.

But the literal sense of Luke 14:26 has been employed by groups such as the Children of God, a sectarian movement that arose in Southern California in the late 1960s, to discourage followers from contacting nonbelieving parents or siblings, said Ronald Enroth of the evangelical Westmont College in Santa Barbara.

“Most of the groups that I study--I call them aberrational Christians--use Luke 14:26 and the equivalent in Matthew 10:36,” said Enroth, author of several books on cults and sects.

Some high-pressure religious groups operating on college campuses try to be friends with recruits around the clock, “to pray with them and slowly dictate how they should run their lives,” said the Rev. Al Axelton, a campus minister at Cal State Northridge.

“They want to isolate them from society and family, because families might try to dissuade them.”

A North Hollywood clergyman recalled how the purposes and use of Scriptures evolved in the ministry of charismatic leader Jim Jones, who led more than 900 Peoples Temple followers to a mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.

The Rev. Robert Bock, pastor of North Hollywood First Christian Church, said that he and Jones were both Disciples of Christ ministers years ago in Indianapolis, the headquarters city for that mainline denomination.

“We watched [Jones] go from a very legitimate ministry to people, to using Scriptures to justify his own ego,” Bock said. “Jones moved a whole congregation from Indianapolis to Oklahoma, then to California.”

The biblical verses urging loyalty to Jesus were interpreted as commands to give loyalty to Jones and his ministers “as ambassadors of God,” Bock said.

On a personal note, Bock said, “I lost three dear friends at Jonestown, a schoolteacher and her two children.”

Bock said he looks at the demanding passages in Luke and Matthew as saying to followers that God will have to be first in their lives and family ties second.

That view was echoed by James Goss, chairman of the religious studies department at Cal State Northridge.

“Jesus was emphasizing the priority of submitting to God,” said Goss, a New Testament specialist who is finishing a book on the historical Jesus.

Goss noted that some New Testament scholars believe that the context for that saying was Jesus’ attempt to break traditional kinship patterns that also determined who held power in the culture. “He sought to reconstitute the family on a new basis--people who were committed to the reign or kingdom of God,” he said.

As such, Goss added: “Any new religious movement is going to take on the appearance of a radical cult. . . . He did get crucified, so he got some people mad.”