Counting the Cost— Luke 14:25-35

Please read today’s passage here: Luke 14:25-35

When you are on the verge of deciding to follow Jesus as his disciple, there are two dangers. The first is to underestimate what possible changes putting your life in his hands may entail. The following incident is totally fictional but not entirely unlikely.

In Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 movie Jesus of Nazareth, there is a scene about halfway into the movie, in which Peter and Matthew, two of the Twelve, were quietly talking as they sat off by themselves before the campfire at night. They were silent and reflective for a while, and then Matthew said to Peter: "You realize, don't you, that you will never go home again? You will never go out in your fishing boat again, never see your home town Bethsaida—never again… None of us will. Everything has changed." This was a very dramatic moment in the film, and it was Zeffirelli's way of putting in terms of an interchange between two of the Twelve the dawning upon them of what discipleship was going to cost them. Jesus once told them, "No one puts his hand to the plow and then looks back".

In today's passage from Luke, Jesus tells the very large crowd that was following him something that probably discouraged many of them.

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple. 27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple" (v. 26-27)

The above translation (from the TNIV) is fairly literal. And I do not wish to soften unduly the words of Jesus. But in all fairness, you should know that the contrasting word-pairs "love" and "hate" in Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages that Jesus thought in, express the attitude the speaker has toward one thing or person he has chosen in preference to another. Thus, when God says in the OT "I have loved Jacob, but hated Esau" (Malachi 1:2-3), he does not mean what the word "hate" conveys to us today. What he is saying is "I have chosen Jacob in preference to his brother Esau". So when we plug this understanding into Jesus' words to the large crowd, we get the following: "If any of you would like to become my disciple, he must be willing to give me preference over all his other allegiances: father, mother, wife, husband, children, brothers, sisters. If he cannot do that, then he cannot be my disciple."

Now, you ask: "Does this mean that I must love my husband or wife or parent or child less?" By no means. In fact elsewhere both Jesus and the apostles who wrote the New Testament command that we love them. But it means that we allow our prior love for God and for our Savior Jesus to determine how we love others. Love that is purified and channeled through a prior love for Jesus cannot contribute to a loved one's ruin. To take an extreme case, if your beloved brother or sister came to you and begged for money to buy drugs, a love that was not purified by prior commitment to Jesus might give the money, seeing how desperately the loved one wanted it.

Similarly, the prior love and commitment to Christ means that you cannot compromise your commitment to him to live a decent life, just because some human loved one urges you to do so.

As we saw in previous postings from Luke, Jesus wants his disciples to set their priorities correctly: First is commitment to God and to his standards of goodness in your life, including worship and prayer. Second is commitment to love others. This is simply another way of saying the two Great Commandments of the Old Testament: (1) Love the Lord your God with all your being, and (2) love your 'neighbor' as yourself. Someone once said: "If you take the first letters of this set of priorities—Jesus, Others, Yourself—it spells "joy".

Another, equally helpful way of viewing Jesus' words here is to interpret them as saying that allegiances and priorities that you had before you became Jesus' disciple must now be demoted in relative importance. We have seen how this was with the "joy" illustration. So when Jesus added "If anyone does not take up his cross and follow me, he cannot be my disciple" he is not asking us to commit literal suicide. But he is asking us to put ourselves last in the sequence of JOY: to metaphorically put ourselves and our selfish desires to death, whenever they threaten to compete with the J and the O. The "crucified life" of the disciple of Jesus means putting yourself "third".

Our passage goes on for quite a few more verses, but these contain only two very well-chosen illustrations that Jesus used with his hearers. If you are going to build a tower, make sure you consider what you will need to do to finish it. the implication is not that you should decide you don't have enough and quit. Rather, it means that the builder allocate what will be necessary and only use what is left for other projects. Similarly, the illustration of the king setting out to battle. It isn't that he lacks enough manpower. Rather, he must be sure to take enough along!

Jesus does not want to scare you away. But he does want you to think soberly about what changes you will need to make in your lifestyle before you go off half-cocked.

And for those of us already on the quest for years, it is still not too late for us to recalculate and to reallocate more time and resources to our discipleship. I know that I need to be more diligent in prayer for my friends and my children. I know that I need to spend less time watching TV and more time writing letters to friends and relatives. I know that I need to spend less money on entertainment and more on giving to others' needs. I am busy making those adjustments. There are way-stations on the road of discipleship where you can offload the activities and expenditures that you have come to see were a hindrance to your progress.