The Call To Follow In Jesus' Footsteps Continues

Here is the deal.  There is one more myth-bubble to pop here.  It is the myth of what Jesus really mean in his teachings and story telling.

Because it is a harsh word Jesus speaks to the crowd. 

He uses words like “hate,” “cost” and “give up all” (you own).

And the listener throws up his/her hands and shouts:  

“It is too hard.”  

     “I cannot live on nothing.”  

          “What you ask is impossible and unrealistic.” 

And the would-be disciple walks the other way.  Not even giving another thought to this crazy person.

One commentator puts it this way:  “Cost is what we give-up to acquire, accomplish, maintain, or produce something.  It involves a measure of sacrifice and perhaps loss or penalty in gaining something.  Cost requires effort and resources…..

Discipleship, we must remember, is a process.  This take time and involves both false starts and modest successes,  as we grow in our faith journeys  to live into the fullness of our humanity and dare to begin to live the holiness that resides in each of us.  As disciples, we learn to face life’s challenges and joys with a spirit of love, hope, faith and peace that leads us to an ever deeper spirituality…..” (Feasting on the Word p.46)

The brain-teaser, in reading the Bible, is that people want to take whatever passage they read literally.  And this gets in the way of how Jesus taught.

Let me try to explain what I think this passage, from Luke, is saying to those who listened to Jesus so long ago.

First of all, lets take the statement:

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.’ 

Do you actually believe that Jesus — a man who personified love — would want you to hate your loved ones? 

Not the Jesus I believe in. 

Just chapters before this one — Luke 6:27 — Jesus tells his disciples not to hate.

  

The word ‘hate,’ in the Greek and Hebrew, is not an emotional or psychological hatred or anger.  Rather a total commitment that gives absolute priority to Jesus.  Hate is a disowning of evil.  (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament)

Secondly it is not the literal “giving up” — giving away — of everything we have.  

³³So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. 

The cost of following Jesus is like reconfiguring — rearranging, altering — of what is essential, and of most value, in living as one who wants to live as Jesus lived.

That is why he told the story about the woman, of the street, who washes his  feet with her tears and anoints them with an extremely extravagant oil. (Read Luke 7: 36-50)

Or when he points out the poor widow who put her last two coins in the temple treasury. (Mk. 12:41-44) 

By telling such stories he was trying to move people past the social and economic standards of success and power; to the wisdom of living in less control and more empathy for others.

The Gospels are full of stories that are meant to help us consider a better, more meaningful life.  The Life Jesus models with his every word and movement.

Discipleship is not all of the sudden becoming someone else who magically turns into some perfect being in a moment of time.

The only perfect being was the man whose skin God lived in. 

His name was Jesus.

25 Now 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. ²⁷Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 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.” 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. ³³So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.(Luke 14)