The holiness of discipleship

 This week's verses are Luke 14:25-33:

Now large crowds were going along with Him; and He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.

 In these verses, Jesus is triangulating on an important truth. He is revealing an issue He wants us to understand before we make the decision to follow him. His words follow right after the parable he shares about the people who were invited to a banquet but who all declined with bad excuses. It's a continuation of that same theme, that God has to be more important than the background of your life. But here He takes it further.

Jesus uses three different markers to describe what discipleship is like. In each case, we are asked to give up something central to our lives in order to demonstrate that Jesus is the most important thing of all. But giving up these things would earn us the rejection and contempt of our society. The same would have been true for the crowds Jesus was talking to at the time. We are asked to choose him not only over the good things in life, not only over the background noise of life, but even over life itself. It's offensive!

The first marker Jesus mentions is family. As far as I have been able to understand it, Jesus is not telling us to hate our relatives in the sense of not loving them. Jesus very much loved his mother Mary, and when he was on the cross, he made arrangements to ensure she would be cared for. What I believe Jesus is saying instead, is that if our family tells us not to be Christians, we should choose Jesus anyway, even if it means losing them.

And what I mean by being Christian is not just publicly admitting to being a Christian, but doing the things Jesus requires of us, and living the way Jesus lived. For instance, if the family business was a payday loan company with predatory rates, and you felt convicted not to take advantage of the poor and unwise, but your mother and father threatened to disown you if you didn't keep at it, and your wife and kids threatened to leave you because they needed that fat salary to pay the bills, would you back out of the path Jesus was leading you down to follow your family's lead instead? Would you follow Jesus even if it meant the end of relationships you really valued and your place in society?

The second marker is the cross. To humiliate those condemned to death, the Romans would make the condemned carry their cross through the streets to the place of execution. People would jeer them and throw things and abuse them to show the Romans they were loyal. To carry the cross was both to suffer humiliation and to be complicit in your own punishment and death.

But we don't live in a society with crosses. For our condemned, we have years-long judicial appeals processes, paid for with hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money, and at the end of it, if you're not set free, the death is generally quick and painless. So, how do we understand the cross in a world without actual crosses?

The obvious answer is that the cross represents persecution that comes from following Jesus devoutly. Your family, and friends, and colleagues, and even complete strangers will look down on you and even sometimes be abusive when they see you live differently. You will be stereotyped as stupid and gullible.

But there is also an element of non-violence, of radical acceptance of suffering, and of humility in the face of condemnation. Think about what kind of person you would have to be to not appeal your execution, the humility you would need to not fight back or try to escape, to willingly do the perp walk without hiding your face, and not even complain. To follow Jesus on his path, in his footsteps, we can't be focused on self-justification and self-defense more than we are focused on him. 

The third marker is our possessions. In our materialist society, in the midst of our post-Black-Friday frenzy of consumerism, this one is probably the most offensive. To be willing to be parted with all of our possessions, without compensation, is surprisingly hard to imagine. Your car? Your house? The clothes off your back? Even your phone?

But our possessions can subtly prevent us from following Jesus. Maybe you know your neighbor is in need, but you also want to buy nice presents for your family this Christmas, and have a comfortable retirement, and keep making payments on the second car, and if you sold your extra furniture your house would look empty, and you spent years collecting those nice antique plates, and you wouldn't get nearly as much money as you paid for those nice shoes if you sold them, and plus you work hard so maybe you kind of deserve all of that, while you don't know that much about what your neighbor does, or has done to be in need.

I know so many people, myself included, whose homes are buried in things, where they couldn't even offer a seat to a visiting friend because of the overflow of their possessions. I know people with cars full of things, books and music and extra shoes, who would have to spend half a day emptying out the trunk and the back seats, and the floor of the passenger seat, if a friend needed help moving, or if someone needed a ride to the airport or the hospital.

And that's not even getting into the people who are deep in credit card debt to have the appearance of a certain lifestyle, who couldn't give money to charity even if they desperately wanted to, even if they were commanded to, because the money God gave them for that is all tied up in things and more things. 

If you knew for certain that you could love others the way Jesus loved them by living with less, in a smaller house, with fewer perks, would you give it all up? Or would you keep things as they are and just agree to love others less or maybe not at all?

What this all boils down to is that we must see our Christian life as more than just a thing we do on Sundays or a philosophy we keep because it makes us good people. What Jesus is telling us in these verses is that it needs to be everything. It cannot take a back seat to your career or your family or your creature comforts or anything on this earth. Jesus has to be everything for us.

If not, we're basically losers. Jesus uses the example of the guy who starts building a house and can't finish, or the king who starts a fight he can't finish. They are both examples of failures that end in humiliation, or worse. If we start on the path of being Christians without thinking through what it may lead to, we may waste our lives pretending to be something we ultimately never were.

So, Jesus is telling us to count the cost of our obedience. Our discipleship has to be holy and unpolluted by other masters. We can't say "Jesus I will follow you to the ends of the earth, unless my mom says I can't." We can't say "Jesus, I will do anything you ask, except martyrdom." We can't say "Jesus I will give you anything, subject to terms and conditions, only out of my disposable income, once I've got all the things I want, if I feel like it." If we say those things, we are telling Jesus that there is a greater master than him.

As you prepare yourself this Advent season, examine the things in your life and make note of those things that have a hold on you that may be too strong. What things and relationships do you find excessively valuable? What people and experiences do you try to avoid at all costs? What are the things you surround yourself with, or turn to, when you want to avoid discomfort and pain? Bring those things to him in prayer, and see if they could end up being too expensive for you to keep.