The Cost of Discipleship.

Luke 14:25-35.

I.

            Luke tells us that large crowds are traveling with Jesus.  But far from being pleased, this appears to annoy him.  Jesus is not interested in popularity.  He does not seem to want large numbers of followers.  He has no strategy for attracting people or getting people to join his movement.  He does not care about getting a lot of new members.

            We know this because he repeatedly does and says things that no one in their right mind would do, were it their intention to attract popular support.  Today’s reading is an example.  It is almost with exasperation and frustration that Jesus turns around to the crowd of people who apparently think this is some kind of circus, and he shouts, “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!”  It not the kind of thing church growth experts recommend we put out on the message board.

            For Jesus sounds here very, well, anti-family.  And this isn’t the only place.  He says this kind of thing several times.  Now, there is a certain level of Hebraic hyperbole here.  Most commentators don’t think he means literally hate, as in despise, loath, and even wish ill on, your family. 

            Too often preachers dealing with words like these think they have to explain how Jesus doesn’t really doesn’t mean it.  But I think we have to take very seriously the possibility that Jesus means what he is saying here.  He says at the very least that disciples have to make their families subordinate and secondary to their relationship with him and with God’s people.  And he knows that families usually don’t put up with that.

            This is threatening stuff.  The family is the basic building block of society.  Everyone knows this.  Undermining the family is a deeply destructive to the social order.  “Hating” parents even goes against the Ten Commandments! 

            But Jesus knows that the family, and people’s commitment to it, very often gets in the way of discipleship.  Family ties are very strong, and they lead to ethnic and national loyalties.  He knows that when people have these commitments binding their hearts their discipleship is compromised.  He knows that it is the family bond that most effectively blocks the relationships that Jesus is creating in this new community he is setting up.

            Families can be little knots of dysfunction where our addictions are enabled and covered up.  They can be dominated by tyrannical fathers.  And they can be incredibly cruel to the weak, the diseased, the vulnerable, and the disfigured.  Jesus has no romantic, sentimental illusions about families; he knows that many are made, or kept, sick by their families.

II.      

            Jesus goes on to say that “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”  Once again just as he does not mean literally hating your family, he here doesn’t require every disciple to be nailed by soldiers to pieces of wood and lifted up to die an excruciating death.  But he does mean suffering.  He means that to be his disciple means doing what he does, in identifying with the victims in society and service to the lowest.

            Families are economic units engineered for “success” according to the world’s standards.  But families, like the larger societies, habitually achieve their success by sacrificing someone.  Usually it is the “other:” other families, strangers, other classes, other nations.  We lift ourselves up by differentiating ourselves from those others, with whom we are in competition.  It is perhaps the darker side of the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality, that is apparent when we also feel we have to keep the Smiths down.

            Sometimes the “other” is someone in our own family who is sacrificed.  It might be someone crippled, or diseased, or developmentally challenged, or even out of control, like a child refusing to stay in their appointed place.  And they are sacrificed, not be actually killing them, but by letting them bear the brunt of the family’s dysfunction.  That’s the one who is the “problem,” that’s the one we have medicated, that’s the one we place the demands on, that’s the one we use to generate sympathy for our family from others.    

            Jesus defines success in a radically different way.  For him, we do not process our suffering by setting up a scapegoat to bear affliction in our place.  Rather, he sees that the problem of suffering is solved by embracing and absorbing and taking on suffering, especially on behalf of others.

            Jesus’ approach is to neutralize suffering by exposing it, sharing it, embracing it… not in any masochistic and self-hating or even self-destructive way, as has too often been the case with Christians who felt that doing harm to themselves and causing themselves pain had some cathartic or even redemptive value.  There is already enough pain and suffering in the world, we don’t have to manufacture more.

            Rather, Jesus has us identify with and commune with others, in particular the others who have been rejected by their families and their society.  “Tax collectors and prostitutes” is the standard shorthand for these individuals in the New Testament.  Jesus always places himself with the people on the margins: the sick, women, children, and those classified as sinners.  The victims and people who need forgiveness, that’s who Jesus associates with. 

            Following his example, Christians have always been known for taking on the pain of others, identifying with and serving victims, living with losers.  These are characteristics of being a Christian that many even today find ridiculous and incomprehensible.

III.

            Then Jesus tells two parables to illustrate how important it is that we honestly count the cost before we make commitments.  He knows that these people who were following him in droves really don’t know what they are getting into.  They did not count the cost first.  Are they all really going to situate themselves with the lowly, the needy, the broken, the excluded, and the sinners?  Are they all prepared to die with Jesus a “death” that starts when they symbolically reject and surrender everything that measures a “successful” life? 

            The first example is someone who starts to build a tower, but has to stop in the middle of the project because he didn’t calculate how much it was going to cost.  He ran out of money before the tower was completed, leaving an embarrassing, unfinished, publicly visible building.  If we start doing something we need to know beforehand that we have the resources to finish it.  Don’t decide to be a disciple of Jesus unless you know you can pay the price, which is often rejection, exclusion, unpopularity, and even suffering.

            The crowd following Jesus around has no clue about all this.  They’re in it for the entertainment value, or because they gain something from being associated with Jesus.  But not only are they going to look foolish when it turns out that Jesus really means it when he says he is going to be crucified, but it also reflects badly on Jesus to have shallow, half-baked, uninformed followers throwing his name around.

            Sometimes I think that the crowd of mindless followers represents and foreshadows the church.  They are people who are willing to be associated with Jesus as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.  In the end they will be screaming for Jesus’ death, even as many Christians over the centuries have been content to bring oppression and death to exactly the people with whom Jesus identifies. 

            Jesus’ second example is of a king faced with war against a stronger power, who wisely negotiates a settlement with the enemy to avoid being defeated in battle.  The king has to pay tribute to the enemy to save his army and his kingdom.

            It is better to give up our wealth, our possessions, our assets, than to be destroyed because we underestimated the cost of what we were getting ourselves into.  If we start on the path of discipleship, we have to be prepared to lose everything.  “So therefore,” Jesus says, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

IV.

             This project, being a disciple, costs us everything: our family, our possessions, even our whole life.  Jesus is saying that this is not a hobby.  This is not something we do in our spare time.  This is not something way down on our priority list.  Discipleship has to be your whole identity, or it is nothing.  We can either be salt, or ash.  There is no such thing as “sort of,” “almost, or “sometimes” salt.  Salt that has lost its flavor is not salt at all.  It is something else with no value.

            Jesus is calling for a completely new orientation and constitution in people.  Discipleship must be done wholeheartedly, or not at all.  It must become your new family.  It must be your only possession.  It must override every other allegiance, loyalty, commitment, relationship, and story in our lives.  And everything else in our life serves this primary, wholehearted devotion.

            No longer do we sacrifice others to achieve our goals.  No longer to others pay for our success.  No longer do we gain from the work of others.  Discipleship means that we are the living sacrifice, as Paul says.  We take on others’ suffering.  We identify with people in their pain, exclusion, brokenness, and bondage.  We become the ones whom others sacrifice for their self-serving vision of the greater good.  We identify with the Crucified, and so identify with God.

            If we die with him a death like his we shall surely be resurrected with him to a life like his.  The only way to the other side, beyond suffering, is through suffering.  Our old, selfish being is sacrificed on the cross with Christ.  We take up that cross ourselves by consciously giving up the loyalties and possessions that people try to use to give themselves meaning, but always fail. 

            We do hate and give up whatever separates us from God.  And at the same time, we become able to express God’s love to all, through whatever resources we are given.  That is the meaning of whole-hearted devotion and single-minded discipleship.  Nothing gets in the way of God’s love pouring through us into the world. 

            Seek first the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness and justice.  Then everything else will come to us, not to hold, hoard, save, or possess; but to give away.  That giving away we see in Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of God.  It is God’s righteousness and justice.  Whatever we try to keep kills us.  But whatever we give away creates room for God to give us even more.  “For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

+++++++