When I was a teenager we used to go up into the Waitakere
rangers at night. There were lots of good places to sit and watch the city
lights… one place was a house up the top of west coast road. It was in a paddock
and from the living room you could look down the valley and across the city.
Well I assume it was the living room because the house was never finished. It
was simply a concrete shell sitting on this prime spot. The walls rather than
being plastered and decorated with fine art was plastered with graffiti,
instead of looking out at the view from behind floor to ceiling glass windows,
when you walked to look out from the edge there was the crunch of broken glass
bottles with each step. The builder had found himself in difficulty with the
council and didn’t have the money to fight it out with them in court. He
started his radical design but hadn’t had the resources to finish the house. Last
time I looked for it I discovered that even the skeleton of that wonderful
house had been demolished… Jesus uses an illustration like this to talk to
those who would be his followers about counting the cost of what discipleship
meant. Three times he tells the large crowd that was following him on his
journey to Jerusalem ‘If you don’t… you cannot be my disciples.’
And we are on that journey to Jerusalem with Jesus as we
work our way through Luke’s gospel. It’s a journey that takes up the central
third of the gospel narrative. It a narrative that focuses on Jesus teaching
and it is a journey that leads Jesus and us to the cross. And it’s not just a journey
through a book of the bible, it is the
journey that we are invited by Christ to walk with him through our lives,
following him, being his disciples, so Jesus words in the passage we are
looking at today are equally challenging to us… ‘if you don’t… you cannot be my
disciples.’
The scene has changed from what has gone before in this
passage. Jesus is again on the road after a Sabbath rest and a Sabbath meal. He
is again on the journey. And like with the change of scene the gospels focus
changes here as well, it moves from Jesus conflict with the religious
leadership, to Jesus beginning to prepare his disciples for life without him.
Like elsewhere in the gospel when Luke mentions that there is a big crowd
following Jesus it leads to Jesus talking about what genuine discipleship
means. Last week we focused on Jesus big hearted invitation to God’s grace.
That it was an open invitation to come and to dine and find sustenance for life
in knowing and being known by Christ, now Jesus moves to look at the fact that
while it is a free invitation to take it up calls us to a costly life style.
It’s not that the invitation has been withdrawn or somehow narrowed down, but
it is an invitation to a journey that is rigorous and demanding. In the wake of
the earthquakes this week, we’ve seen a road opened up to Kaikoura for relief,
but it is a dangerous and arduous journey and the Authorities have said that to travel that road
you need to be in a military grade 4 wheel drive. Here Jesus the leader of
those who would follow him in the Kingdom of God tells people that to partake
in that journey is going to arduous there are things that will have to be left
behind if you are to make it.
Jesus starts with words that shock us as much as they did
his first listeners. ‘if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and
mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters-yes even his own life-such a
person cannot be my disciples. The word
hate seems so harsh and hard. It’s not the way Hate is used by a petulant
teenager wrestling with not getting their own way. It’s not the hate of a group
opposed to any ethnic group apart from their own. It is that being a follower
of Jesus changes your priorities. It is a matter of putting Jesus first, loving
Jesus more, Jesus above even the prior demands of family and kin. For some
following Jesus has literally meant that they are ostracised and cut off from
their families. A messianic Jewish acquaintance told us that when he became a
follower of Jesus his family held a funeral, it was now as if he was dead, if
he rings home they will simply hang up as if he does not exist anymore. A
Muslim convert to Christ talked of the look of pain and grief in his parents eyes
now every time he goes home. The choice to follow Jesus impacted their family
ties.
But for many of us this is not the case, yet even as Minister
I have had to make decisions about following the sense of call, that impact on
my family. It has mean being willing to move and make a new start in different
towns and cities. It has meant that while my kids were young I spent a lot of
time with other people’s teenagers and yet when we have done ministry we’ve
gone to churches that did not have youth ministry. I value the fact that my
kids know that being part of a church is very much about a willingness to
serve, not how it caters to their needs. But Kris and I have had to make those
kinds of decisions about family and faith.
In many of Jesus teaching about discipleship we see people
torn between following Jesus and their possessions, status, comfort and
prestige, the image Jesus uses to finish with is a man walking with a cross. To
follow Jesus will demand our life our soul our all.
Jesus goes on to give two examples from the life of the
first century to tell people that they need to count the cost. He uses the idea
of a landowner building a tower, either a watch tower in a vineyard or a
defensive tower on a city wall. To build such a thing has a definite cost and
the person would be stupid indeed to start such a project without having his
finances sorted. Likewise Jesus uses the image of a king planning to go to war,
and having to decide if his limited resources were enough to win the battle, if
it wasn’t he would be best to go and negotiate peace with his opponent. Jesus
concludes this by saying that unless you are willing to give up everything you
have you cannot be my disciples. I was speaking to a fellow minister this week
who said he had chosen the song “ I surrender all” last week for church and
after the service he had a parishioner come up and criticise his choice of
song, when he ask why she honestly replied “I’m not prepared to give up
everything, something’s yes but not all’.
NT Wright points out that talking about building projects
and military campaigns would have been very poignant for Jesus listeners. Two significant
movements in Jesus day were the rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem, it has been
started by Herod and continued by his descendants, in Marks’ account of Palm
Sunday has Jesus disciples commenting on the wonderful decorations on the
temple, and Jesus tells them that it will be destroyed and rebuilt in three
days. But it was a project that took lots of finances and resources from the
community and reflected the nations hope in temple worship. The other movement
was the hope of revolt and military action liberating Judea from Roman
occupation. Jesus comments here are very relevant as they speak to the
challenge of having to deal with the roman army. It is easy for us to have our
hopes for change and reform in institutions and movements other that following
Jesus, Political reform, certain candidates on the left or the right, or even
religious institutions and again Jesus tells his disciples that even these
things need to be put in the right priority when it comes to following him.
Finally Jesus uses the illustration of salt to tell people
about what is required of a disciple. Salt is good says Jesus, in his day it
was used for preserving food, flavouring and also as fertilizer, ‘but says
Jesus if it loses its saltiness it is no longer any use and can only be thrown
out and trampled underfoot. People have always wondered about what Jesus means
about salt losing its saltiness. IN Palestine there were two types of salt, one
was the top grade salt and the other more common salt was a crystallised salt,
which was made up of both salt and other substances and over time the salt
would leech away leaving only the other substances which were no good for
anything and would be thrown out. It
easy for Disciples of Jesus to start off with all sorts of enthusiasm and new
resolve to live with different values ones that reflect Jesus but it is also
easy over time for those to be leeched out of us and replaced again by the
values and actions of our culture.
Ok how does this apply to us?
The first thing is that it might be easy to think that this
passage seems to go contrary to what we looked at last week, an invitation to
God’s big hearted banquet of God’s grace: An invitation to come and find
sustenance for life in Jesus. Is Jesus now saying that somehow we have to earn
our salvation? That the invitation is not free?
The short answer is no. Jesus teaching on what it means to be a disciple
is sandwiched in between both the parable of the great banquet and the parables
of the lost sheep and coin and the prodigal son, all of which focus on God’s
grace. Even in this passage is the sense of invitation: Jesus call is to ‘whosoever’
anyone who will hear and respond. But here Jesus is not taking of earning God’s
favour or invite, but rather what it means for us to respond to it. As we saw
last week people used excuses of land, wealth and he prior demand of family to
reject the invite and here Jesus is telling us that to accept that invitation
is the opposite of that, to love Jesus more than those. It is how we live out
our lives in response. To show the grace we have received to other people,
invite the poor the lame and the blind, in our decision making and actions to
have our actions and reactions reflect Christ, not our own agenda or comfort.
The second thing is discipleship is an on-going process, it
is a journey and Jesus saying here are as challenging and demanding every step
along that journey. It impacts on every area of our lives, how we deal with our
finances, remember in Luke’s gospel the extent of how deeply we have allowed
Jesus into our lives is displayed in how deep it impacts on our wallet, it
impacts on our business ethics, how we deal with the people we deal with. It
impacts on the openness of our door to hospitality. How we use our assets, our
time. Making a stand when it isn’t popular. Offering forgiveness and love to
those who mistreat us. It calls us to re-evaluate where we are at and where we
are heading in each new life stage. To priorities Christ in these situations
calls us to be people who will allow Jesus to speak into our lives, open up the
scriptures and open ourselves to what they have to say.
Discipleship says Jesus is an ongoing matter of reflection
and contemplation that leads to action.
This passage finishes with Jesus letting us know how serious
his sayings are ‘for those who have ears, let them listen’. All the way through
the gospel Jesus understanding of what is discipleship is the one who hears
Jesus words and puts them into practise in their lives. That is the solid
foundation to build a house on; to build our lives on. It is the way in which we know the soil is
good and can grow a crop that will yield tenfold or one hundred fold, it is
that choosing to go by the narrow way. You and I are invited to put Jesus
first, pick up our cross and follow Jesus… to say with Paul “it is no longer I
that liveth, but Christ that liveth in me.”
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