Counting Up the Cost of Discipleship

 

        In Luke 9:57-62 we see Jesus breaking every rule of the church growth movement. Jesus has three potential people who are ready to follow him, and yet after a brief conversation with each it seems like Jesus has quickly lost all 3 potential disciples. I can imagine that many church leaders would have some harsh words for Jesus in this situation if Jesus were their pastor. They’d say something like, “Jesus, we need to be streamlining points of entry into our church. We need to be making it as easy for people to come as possible. When they express any interest in coming, we need to stress all the benefits of doing so: making friends, finding purpose, good music, captivating sermons, and so forth. What are you doing immediately focusing on things they’d have to sacrifice if they were to become a Christian? That’s not going to win as many converts. Jesus, at least wait a year before you start bringing that stuff up. And even then, make the level of sacrifice seem more palatable. You know, maybe we’ll ask them for some moderate donations or an hour of volunteering here or there, but don’t scare people off!”

            That all seems like reasonable wisdom. And that seems to be how most churches are functioning today. And they are not doing so for entirely wrong reasons at all. Right? Can you imagine if a similar situation happened to any of us today where three people showed up who were eager to follow Jesus and join your church? I don’t think we’d be asking many follow up questions like Jesus did, I think we’d sign them right up. We’d be absolutely thrilled that someone wants to come and be a disciple alongside of us. We aren’t in the habit of making long checklists to grill people on before they can join or making lots of difficult hoops to jump through, because the church isn’t a place that only welcomes perfect people. No, the church is a place of grace. We don’t comb through a person’s past and make sure they are righteous enough before they’re allowed in. We say, “Come on in! If you want to be here, if you want to follow Jesus, join us. We’ll help you discover everything that that is about.”

            We act that way for pretty good reasons. But Jesus, here in Luke 9, acts completely differently than we would expect him to act or than we would think to act ourselves. We want to make becoming a Christian seem as easy as possible, but Jesus sometimes seems to start right off with talking about just how hard it is. Is Jesus doing this purposefully to scare off potential converts? No. I think Jesus is very glad that people want to come and follow him. He simply wants people to know what they are getting themselves into should they do so. Before they commit to the path of discipleship, he wants them to first reassess in their own heads, “Do I really want to follow Jesus?” This is a question we all must periodically re-ask ourselves, “Do I really want to follow Jesus?”

            Let’s look at Jesus’ interactions with these would-be followers of Jesus to help us ponder that question for ourselves. Well, the first person who comes up to Jesus, comes up and makes a pretty bold claim. They say to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” This is indeed the act of discipleship, and this phrasing makes me think of faithful and loyal people like Ruth (who told Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you stay, I will stay.”) and like Elisha (who told Elijah over and over, “I will not leave you.”) If we truly want to be disciples of Jesus we must be willing to go wherever Jesus goes. But when this would-be follower said he would do that, it was a bold claim. And I think Jesus must’ve been unsure if this person was sincere. He must have been thinking, “Really, you’d follow me wherever?” Well, if that’s true, Jesus thinks, I better warn you that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but I have nowhere to lay my head.

            This statement had immediate connections to the reality of Jesus’ itinerant lifestyle. Jesus was in the midst of traveling from town to town preaching the gospel. And this was in the age before hotels and Airbnbs, the age before traveling by planes and trains and automobiles. To follow the historical Jesus in the first century would mean that you wouldn’t have anywhere to call home. You’d have long, hot journeys to different areas where you’d have to rely on the hospitality of others or set up camp for the night outside. So, Jesus is basically asking this would-be follower, “You say you want to follow me, but would you really want to follow me instead of having the safety and comfort of having a home?”

            To be a follower of Jesus in the twenty-first century doesn’t necessarily entail an itinerant lifestyle. That is still sometimes the case where Jesus calls some to be missionaries or evangelists and leave home to do God’s work. However, whether Jesus is calling you abroad or calling you to stay right where you are planted, the same question holds: do we really want to follow Jesus more than we want to have safety and comfort? Because many, if they’re honest, really would prefer the latter. Many would rather have a life of ease than a life with Jesus. But Jesus warns us would-be followers many times in the gospels that the life of discipleship would not be one of ease. Jesus said that the world hated him and if the world hated him, it will hate us if we follow him. And notice that Jesus never says things like “if you are persecuted”. He says things like “when you are persecuted”, or “you will be persecuted on account of my name”. Following Jesus, it often brings us into places where we neither feel safe nor comfortable.

Do we really want to follow Jesus? To follow Jesus in the twenty-first century, well, Jesus may be among the poor, Jesus may be among the imprisoned, Jesus may be among those in war-torn nations. Do you really want to follow Jesus wherever he goes? Because after all, Jesus goes to the cross, and he asks those who would follow him to pick up their crosses and follow after him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Just the rare few are called to literal martyrdom, but all are called to die to their old self, to have their old desires and ambitions and dreams crucified, and to be built anew. Do you really want to follow Jesus wherever he goes? Or do you really just want to follow him into some places but not others?

            The second person is called by Jesus to follow him, and he says, “Yes, just let me go and bury my father first.” Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Now, this person seemed to have a very noble and simple request. This person wanted to honor his father. And isn’t that the 5^th commandment, to honor one’s father and mother? And surely it wouldn’t take long to bury him. In the Old Testament it was even often considered culturally a sign of great dishonor for one’s body to be left unburied. Could you imagine how offended people in the church would be if I told them, “No, no, no, it doesn’t matter that your loved one just passed away, don’t worry about that, the work of the church is more important right now, we need you to serve at this event today instead.”? It’s something that no human could ever ask of another human, it would be wrong of them. And yet God alone has every right to do this. Jesus, in making this high demand of a would-be follower, is showing that God takes precedence even over the best and highest things in life. It is good and wonderful to honor a father, and doing so is almost never is in opposition to following God, it’s typically a sign of following God. Nevertheless, honoring one’s father is the 5^th commandment. But guess what the first commandment is? To put God first.

I think of Jesus’ tough request here as similar to in the Old Testament when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Typically, such an action would be an act of the greatest evil and most horrific to even think about. Our duty to love our children is one of the greatest duties in life. And yet the call of God must come first. And Abraham in faith was willing to carry through with his grim task, but only because he had the faith that God could resurrect his son. After Abraham showed his willingness to give ultimate obedience to God, God made sure that he did not have to follow through on the terrible deed, he gave a ram to be sacrificed in Isaac’s place. I wonder if here too, if the would-be follower had only showed a willingness to prioritize Jesus and God’s call above even his dead father, that then Jesus would have made sure that he didn’t actually have to abandon his father, but if Jesus would have gone with him afterwards to the tomb and helped bury him and mourned with his new disciple.

Jesus here is living out what he said in Luke 14 that any who do not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, cannot be his disciple. Now he’s using hyperbole here. He doesn’t literally mean to hate them. He means that the call of God is such that it takes precedence even over one’s duties to one’s family. Sometimes obedience to Jesus can disrupt and divide even a family. And yet God must come first. And yet that same God can heal and reconcile that family.

Isn’t it interesting how sometimes even good things can become barriers between us and God? Anything, bad or good, can become an idol if we make it more important than Jesus and his call. And so, this person must too reconsider whether they really want to follow Jesus. Do they really want to follow someone who demands supreme loyalty, who demands that he comes before anything and everything in one’s life, who comes even before one’s own family? Is this path of discipleship really for them?

For the third would-be follower of Jesus, they too say to Jesus, “I will follow you, but let me first say farewell to those at home.” Again, not a ridiculous request. I would certainly hope that a family member would come and say goodbye to me before they left on a missionary journey. But here’s the issue. Did you notice what this person is doing? This person is setting their own conditions for following after Jesus. I will follow you if you let me do this. The disciple is trying to set the conditions of discipleship. The disciple is trying to set the parameters around the manner in which he will follow Jesus. It cannot be so. We cannot, in no matter how small of a way or however noble a way, hold on for ourselves any area of control or mastery of our own lives if we truly want to be a servant of Jesus. We have to fully make God our master and fully obey. Now again, my thought is that if this would-be disciple truly was willing to fully follow Jesus in obedience, then one of Jesus’ first commands to him, it’s possible that it would have been, "Go, say bye to your family, then quickly come back." But God alone has that authority, the disciple does not get to set the conditions of discipleship. So Jesus is in essence asking the same question to the third person again, “Do you really want to follow me? Are you really ready to give up all control and be led by me and not by yourself?”

Jesus tells this person that, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Basically I see Jesus saying here that with the full glory of the kingdom ahead of you, you cannot let your eyes be caught thinking about the things you will lose or have to give up to take part. The surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ as Lord should make all other things seem of insignificant value. Don’t be like Lot’s wife who instead of running towards salvation looked back towards destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. The one who plows a field needs to look ahead at where he is going if the lines are going to stay straight, otherwise they will swerve and zigzag. I experienced this as a kid growing up when I would try and use sidewalk chalk to make four square lines on my driveway. I would crouch down and draw with the chalk as I walked backwards and the lines ended up just atrocious and awful. If I had just walked forward, looking at a fixed point where I was headed, the lines would have been so much straighter. In the kingdom of God our eyes need to be fixed on Jesus, not looking back at sins we have to give up.

Well, in the end, the Bible does not explicitly say whether or not these three people decided to accept the conditions of discipleship, but traditionally it has been interpreted that they did not. All three came with an idea in their head of what it meant to follow after Jesus, but Jesus let them know what the path of discipleship would really look like. And after hearing the cost of discipleship, they perhaps had to turn away downcast and grieving, for they had discovered that they were not ready to follow Jesus wherever he went. There were aspects to discipleship that they were not willing to take on. 

They are not alone in finding the call of God too hard. In Luke 18 a rich young ruler wanted to inherit eternal life. And Jesus told him you are lacking but one thing, do this one thing and you can be my disciple. But he turned away downcast. In John 6 great crowds followed after Jesus because they were astounded at how he fed the five thousand. But after hearing his teachings, some of which were controversial or difficult, it said that many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.

Jesus consistently welcomed everybody. But he also wasn’t afraid to lose followers if the call of discipleship was too demanding for them. Indeed, Jesus wanted people to know the full cost of discipleship before they committed their lives to him. Jesus didn’t care to try and pull the wool over people’s eyes and sell them on a life of ease and comfort if only it got him more followers. No, Jesus wanted people to count up the full cost, every sacrifice it would take, everything they’d have to give up and deny, but Jesus wanted people to see that it was worth it. That it was worth every penny they had if only they could get heavenly treasures. That it was worth losing the whole world, if you could but gain your soul. That all they’d have to give up was petty and small compared to all that they stood to gain.

Who having counted up the cost of discipleship would still want to follow after Jesus? Only those who have glimpsed the surpassing glory of Christ.