Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
»But Jesus answered: Amen, I say to you, whoever leaves his own possessions, and parents, and brothers, and wealth, for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, shall receive a hundredfold.« But let not even this trouble us, nor that saying still harsher than it, uttered elsewhere in these words: »Whoever does not hate father and mother and children, and moreover his own soul too, cannot be my disciple.« For the God of peace does not introduce hatred and estrangement from those dearest to us — he who, indeed, exhorts us to love even our enemies. But if enemies are to be loved, then by the same proportion, rising upward from them, those nearest of kin are to be loved as well; or if those of one's own blood are to be hated, then the argument, descending in the same proportion, teaches that enemies are to be set at a still greater distance — so that the two sayings, in destroying one another, would stand convicted of contradiction. But they do not destroy one another, not even nearly. For it is from one and the same judgment and disposition, and by one and the same standard, that a man would both hate a father and love an enemy: namely, the man who neither retaliates against an enemy nor reveres a father more than Christ. For in the one saying the Lord cuts away hatred and the doing of evil; in the other, an excessive and misplaced deference toward one's own kindred. If a father or a son or a brother should prove godless and become a hindrance to someone's faith, and an obstacle to the life above, so as to harm his salvation, then let him not agree with such a one nor be of one mind with him, but let him dissolve the tie of fleshly kinship for the sake of the spiritual enmity it entails.
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