(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Reality Check”, originally shared on September 6, 2025. It was the 375th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
It’s been said that Jesus comforted the afflicted and afflicted the
comfortable, and he did. But not nearly in the way most people understand it
today. We’re going to find out why.
Why? Because many of them
thought that Jesus was their golden ticket. Instead, Jesus gives them a reality
check.
I saw a meme once 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 wake-up call!
Yet, I don’t think that any of
us could be given bigger jolt, a stiffer punch, a wakier wake-up call, or a
more difficult reality check than what Jesus gives us in the passage from the
Bible that we are looking at this week, in Luke 14:25-33.
Great crowds were following
Jesus through the small towns and rural areas north of the big city, Jerusalem.
Many of them thought that he would be a military leader, that he would make
Israel great again. He would soon enter the city to die. Jesus has been giving
the crowds reality checks, and then, in case anyone hadn’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 (Genesis
29:33), when it is clear that he loved her. Using an extreme example to
signal an important point was a common rhetorical device in Bible times. The
message was that he preferred Rachel over Leah.
That is what “hate”
means in this week’s Gospel reading. It tells us that we are fully defined
by nothing other than God. Not by family. Not even by life itself.
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 back 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 in Baptism through faith in Jesus. They will be connected to Jesus Christ
in every way.
Following Jesus did not mean
making Jesus the most important thing in a person’s life, it meant making our
relationship with Jesus everything in our life, and everything about us
in our lives flows from there.
He makes it plain in Luke
14:27,
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. Are they ready? 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 in Africa. 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 headquarters of the African National Congress in
exile during the Apartheid period in South Africa. A school for skilled workers
and a school for teachers in Tanzania are also located there. It’s a great
location for a church. The contractors build as money is available. When there
is no more money they know to stop. That way there’s no embarrassment. 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. They were
embarrassed. They had not planned adequately.
You’ve probably seen stories in
the news about the huge high-rise condominium projects in downtown LA that have
been sitting unoccupied and covered with graffiti because the owners ran out of
money and couldn’t complete the project. I’m sure that 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 $840,000.00 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
plan for what would likely be the longest time of their lives together as a
family and as followers of Jesus Christ. They honored God with their witness.
Jesus continues to encourage
people who plan to follow him to count the cost of forever 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. It’s not a religion; it’s a relationship.
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 about what that
means in the light of eternity. What does it mean to be aware of the cost of
discipleship?
Have you ever sent someone a
text and then immediately wished that 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. So, I
ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches pretty much three times a day. I figured
I could reach my goal. 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 could reach my goal. 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 and
even the people that we value most in this world.
And then, when we’ve just
started to make sense of the family stuff in this week’s text, 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? What does that
mean? All of us have some possessions, right? Does Jesus want us to have yard
sales right now?
Even Jesus’ closest disciples
seem to still have possessions after he died and rose. Peter and James
and John and Andrew went back to their boats to pick up where they had
left off as commercial fishermen.
In fact, the possessions we
have may even have increased during the Labor Day holiday sales last
Monday. 😊
I think that Jesus is calling
his followers, us, to go all in. To 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.
But, even then, they won’t save
us.
When many people, especially in
mainline churches, say today that “Jesus comforted the afflicted and afflicted
the comfortable”, they are almost uniformly speaking in social and political
contexts. They see in Jesus someone who is just like them: community
organizers.
And Jesus desires a
better life for all people, but it begins with a living relationship with the
one true living God. That faith produces a desire to make things better. The
people in today’s Gospel lesson, as do many today, saw it the other way around.
“Give us what we want, and then we will believe.” Jesus does not start with
what we want, but with what we need; the living relationship with the
one true living God for which human beings were created.
Jesus is calling those who
would be his followers to a better life, a life they could not see or
understand because they stood outside his saving act on the cross, where Jesus,
who had no things, gave what he did have, his life.
Jesus is calling those who
would be his followers to be part of the Body of Christ, to use the gifts that
God has given them to make the world better, more like the world God created it
to be, in accord with what God has called us to be. The result is what we do.
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.
It’s not like that in the reign
of God.
The best deal was won for us on the cross, and it cost Jesus everything. Jesus calls us to live in the same way. All in with Jesus.
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