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" In a peasant society, where familial relations provided one’s basic identity, it was shocking in the extreme. In first-century Jewish culture, for which the sense of familial and racial loyalty was a basic symbol of the prevailing worldview, it cannot but have been devastating.135 Jesus was proposing to treat his followers as a surrogate family. This had a substantial positive result: Jesus intended his followers to inherit all the closeness and mutual obligations that belonged with family membership in that close-knit, family-based society. It also carried fairly clear negative consequences in that society: to be a member of one family meant sitting loose to membership in any other. Hence the remarkable demands for Jesus’ followers to ‘hate’ father, mother, siblings, spouse and children—and even their own selves.136 This was not just extraordinarily challenging at a personal level; it was deeply subversive at a social, cultural, religious and political level, as we shall see in due course. "
― N.T. Wright , Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #2)
