(Note: This blog entry is based on the text “How To Get A Good Deal”, originally shared on August 31, 2022. It was the 232nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
People were following Jesus by the thousands
toward the end of His public ministry. Yet Jesus wasn’t collecting their
contact information. He was discouraging them. Today we’re going to find out
why.
I saw a meme the other day that showed a guy
in bed talking on a hotel phone. He says, “Hi, I’d like a wake-up call.” The
woman at the desk says, “Of course sir. For the wages of sin is death; but the
gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23)
That’s a needed eye-opener!
Yet, I don’t think that any of us could be
given bigger jolt, a stiffer punch, or a wakier wake-up call than what Jesus
gives in the passage from the Bible that we are looking at today, in Luke
14:25-33.
Great crowds were following Jesus through
the small towns and rural areas north of the big city, Jerusalem. He would soon
enter the city to die. Jesus has been giving them reality checks, and then, in
case anyone hasn’t gotten the point, he says this, in Luke 14:25-26,
25Now large crowds were
traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, 26“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.
Family, and clan, and village, were the
primary sources of life and identity in Jesus’ time on earth. What was he
saying?
God gave a commandment about loving one’s
parents, it’s the first one in the section on how we treat one another: “Honor your
father and your mother.” Martin Luther, the 16th Century Church
reformer described its meaning as being that, “We are to fear (respect) and
love God, so that we neither despise nor anger our parents and others in
authority, but instead honor, serve, obey, love, and respect them.”
Is there anything in any of that that
suggests that we should hate them?
The apostle Paul, in his first letter to
Timothy in 1Timothy 5:8, says,
And whoever does not
provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith
and is worse than an unbeliever.
What is Jesus saying, then?
“Hate” is used here as it had been for
hundreds of years as an expression for preferring one thing over another, as
when the Bible says that Jacob “hated” Leah, when it is clear that he loved
her. Using an extreme example to signal an important point was a common
rhetorical device. The message was that he preferred Rachel over Leah.
Jesus is saying that following him is to be
nothing less than a life transforming gift. That gift is a restoration of the
relationship with God for which human beings were created but which they
destroyed in their disobedience. It will be won by Jesus’ obedience, giving his
life on the cross.
His followers will be transformed, made a
new Creation, born again. They will go through death to life through faith in
Jesus. They will be connected to Jesus Christ in every way.
He makes it plain in verse 27,
27Whoever does not carry the cross
and follow me cannot be my disciple.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis
toward the end of World War II, wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship
in which he says, (at a time when gender language was different) “When Christ calls a
man, he bids him come and die.”
Jesus calls
people to die to their old selves, their old lives, their old relationships, to
everything.
Jesus is telling those in the crowds that there
is a difference between following him and just following him around.
The life of obedience to God will soon be
costly for Jesus, and those who would be his followers need to be aware of that
reality. He gives the example of planning in an honor and shame culture, in verses
28-30.
28For which of you,
intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to
see whether he has enough to complete it? 29Otherwise, when he
has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to
ridicule him, 30saying, ‘This fellow
began to build and was not able to finish.’
A church I served for many years helped
support church building construction with our brothers and sisters in Christ in
Tanzania. Sally and I continued that support after our retirements. We are
currently helping with the building of a church in Dakawa, on the site of the
former African National Congress headquarters in exile during the Apartheid
period in South Africa. A school for skilled workers and a school for teachers
in Tanzania is also located there. The contractors build as money is available.
When there is no more money they know to stop. That’s the plan.
I was told that the library at UC San Diego
was built with support beams on the outside supporting what some affectionately
called a birdhouse structure. The problem builders faced, however, was that the
architectural engineers had only accounted for the weight of the building, not
the books. Cracks started to appear as the books were being loaded on the
shelves and the building had to be retrofitted. That was not the plan.
The average NFL football player’s career
lasts 3.3 years, according to ESPN. A rookie’s annual salary starts at over
$700,000.00 a year with guaranteed raises for the first several years of up to
25%, unless they are superstars or achieve celebrity status and then it can go
much higher. Yet, 78% of the players go broke within 3 years after retirement.
I heard Jordy Nelson speak at a Christian youth gathering when he was playing
for the Green Bay Packers. He talked about how he and his wife knew that they
would not always be a part of the NFL, and they wanted to be prepared in every
way for what would likely be the longest time of their lives together as followers
of Jesus Christ. That’s receiving and accepting plans for forever.
Jesus continues to encourage people who want
to follow him to count the cost in verses 31-32,
31Or what king, going
out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider
whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him
with twenty thousand? 32If he cannot, then,
while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms
of peace.
Following Jesus is a way of life. Jesus asks
those around him if they are ready.
It’s been said that if you fail to plan you
plan to fail. We need to take a minute and think.
Have you ever sent someone a text and then
immediately wished you could take it back? Or have you ever written a personal
email and then hit “send all” instead of just to the one person you intended to
reach? Just a little awareness can make all the difference.
When I was in seminary, there was a summer
when I could afford to pay for classes or eat regular meals. I ate peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches pretty much three times a day but figured I could
do both. I just had to pay the price.
My first year there, I had enough money for
an admission ticket to the Monterey Jazz Festival or the gas to get there and
back. I bought the ticket and hitched rides along the way. (That was in another
world.) I just had to pay the price.
Jesus asks if we are willing to pay the
price to follow him, which may include alienation from the things we value in
this world.
Then, when we’ve just started to make sense
of the family stuff, Jesus gets even crazier, in verse 33,
33So therefore, none of
you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
What? All of us have some
possessions, right? Even Jesus’ closest disciples seem to have possessions
after he died and rose. What did Peter and James and John and Andrew do? They
went back to their boats to pick up where they had left off as commercial
fishermen.
We may even increase our
possessions at the Labor Day Weekend sales this week.
I think that Jesus is calling
his followers to go all in. We put everything we are and everything we have,
including all our possessions, into the hands of Jesus. They are not status
symbols. They are means for ministry.
Jesus is calling those who would be his
followers to a better life, a life they could not see or understand because the
stood outside the cross.
Jesus is calling those who would be his
followers to be part of the Body of Christ, to use the gifts God has given them
to make the world better, more like the world God created it to be.
One of my colleagues once said that when
people visited his church and told him that they were “Church shopping”, he
often stifled the urge to say, “Then I hope you find a bargain.”
Everybody likes a good deal, the best
quality for the lowest cost.
That’s not the way it is in the reign of
God.
The best deal was won for us on the cross,
and it cost Jesus everything.
Why do we call the day that Jesus gave his
life for us “Good Friday”? Because it was bad for Jesus, but it was good for
us.
Following Jesus likewise may call for
sacrifices, but we gain way more than we lose. It certainly calls us to
reorient the way we live our lives and live them for God and for others.
Labor Day, like all days, is a good day to
consider our vocation, a word whose root comes from the Latin word “vocare” or
to call. Our vocation is to be followers of Jesus Christ. It is what we are
called to do and to be.
His gift leads to a new life, eternal life,
beginning in this life and continuing forever for all who receive it. We follow
Him knowing that whatever the cost now, our lives have been redeemed and made
new.
We receive that gift as the best deal of
forever, and it has transformed us,
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)
That’s a really good
deal.
