This understanding of love is what Jesus attempts to transmit to his disciples, and not the narcissistic love or eros at stake in identification. In emphasizing that only those who accept the loss and destruction of everything they hold dear will find life, he makes clear that this love is not a binding force that undoes alienation and death, but a love that involves the loss of the world itself:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:34–39)