A story about the cost of living [Luke 14.25–35]Sermon preached at All Hallows by Ruth Hutchison on 5 September 2004May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Christ our creator and redeemer. This week, I have been trying to convince myself that following the Church of England’s weekly readings is a good idea. It’s good because it urges us to delve into passages and stories in the bible that we otherwise would skip over. This would be one such passage for me, because I have found it a little too harsh and too inaccessible on previous readings. So, to help prompt a few ideas for today’s offering I borrowed two commentaries from Ray on the Gospel of Luke. One I have found quite helpful, in prompting a few questions and confirming ideas. The other book I found less helpful, as it completely missed out our reading for today. I guess I wasn’t the only one who found it hard to read. So, this is a small offering of my wandering, meandering thoughts, some of which I hope will be of some use to you. Despite my slightly negative introduction to this passage, I have to admit that I do quite like this story, because in it we see Jesus doing one of the things he does best: he tells it like it is. He doesn’t mince his words, he doesn’t bother with disclaimers, he doesn’t bother with gentle introductions, he just gets on and says what he needs to say. You can almost picture the scene: a crowd, Jesus, a few disciples, maybe he’s a bit hungry, a bit tired, not really in the mood for long-drawn-out stories, not really in the mood for messing around, for playing the crowd today. Maybe it’s a bit hot, maybe Jesus feels like some of the crowd are just along for a ride, and maybe they came along for a bit of light afternoon entertainment. Maybe they’re intrigued by this slightly wacky preacher. So he starts with a great opening line. In verse 26 he says: ‘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.’ Now there are a number of possibilities as to the meaning of this statement.
Maybe the last one is possible, but I think that this story is about what it is going to cost us if we decide to enter into a relationship with Christ. It is both a warning and an invitation. A warning of the costs involved and an invitation to pay the price. This is a wake-up call to the crowd to get their priorities right. It’s Jesus telling them that this is no joke, and that following Christ, choosing life over death, is going to cost them, big time, in some of their cases. And it is a warning to them to consider whether they are really up for it. This is Jesus asking where our allegiance lies. However, I don’t think this is a call to leave behind everyone you love, as it can often be read. Jesus isn’t the ultimate home-wrecker. I believe it is an invitation, albeit a scary one, to rediscover our true potential to love, in relationship with Christ first and foremost. It’s not a bad offer, but Jesus wants us to take it seriously. Jesus is not our travel agent to eternity, outlining the benefits of a package holiday with God; he is preparing his followers for the turbulent journey ahead of them. Get your priorities right he says — your family, your donkey, and your best sandals are not going to be enough for what lies ahead. And we have the benefit of hindsight; we now know what lay ahead for these followers in the lead-up to the crucifixion and in the years afterwards. It was no picnic, it wasn’t a jolly holiday for Christ and his followers, they were dissidents in the Roman Empire, and they would know and experience the full force of this. They would be tired and weary, they would feel despair, hopelessness and abandonment, they would be ridiculed, they would be imprisoned and tortured, and they would be killed. They would have to rely on others’ generosity; they could lose their homes, their families, and their social status. They could lose everything that they held dear to them. Knowing this, I ask myself whether these words of Christ seem so harsh? Does it seem so strange to ask that these followers love him above anything else, knowing that they may well lose everything else because of him? Does it seem so strange to prepare his followers for the full force of hatred that they would experience by giving them the opportunity to experience the full force of God’s love? This is a warning of what is to come, but it is also an invitation to receive the best gift of all, life, through Christ. We have to remember the situation into which this was written. Jesus is speaking in a land under Roman occupation. He is not welcome there, the freedom and love that he speaks of is a direct challenge to Roman rule by force and fear, his obedience to God and not to the emperor means that he is a wanted man. There is a price on his head, and this is what Jesus is warning people about. If you follow me, then you will be required to go places and do things that will put your lives, as they stand now, in danger. You have to have your priorities straight, he says. And this is the same for us today, if we take the message of the gospel seriously. This passage is an antidote to lukewarm, mediocre Christianity. It is an invitation to experience our true potential to love through our relationship with Christ. And through this relationship, we will be called into untold battlefields in our world today, where we will need to rely upon and draw from our loving relationship with Christ as our source of strength, wisdom and power. This is why we need to have our priorities right. Neither our sisters, nor our husbands, nor our partners, nor our mothers will be able to provide this level of strength, wisdom and power. It is worth noting at this point that the word ‘husband’ is not used in the list of family members to ‘hate’. Maybe he presumed all the women did already hate their husbands, or more likely it’s because the literature would be addressed to the most dominant or powerful group of those times, the men. However, it is interesting in this passage, because it directly challenges the chief beneficiaries of the family structure of New Testament times, namely men. They were the ones who benefited most from the prestige and honour of the family. It is the men in this case who may have found it hardest to let go of their prestige and social status in order to follow this oddball preacher. Jesus is perhaps saying to them, I will not provide the glory, the social status that you have now; following me will not add to your prestige; you need to be able to give up these things in order to follow me. Now that probably didn’t go down too well. You can just imagine a few of the crowd sneaking off at this point, turning to each other and saying: ‘Ooh, is it that time already?’ Or edging away: ‘Gotta go — things to do, people to see.’ If Jesus was aiming to separate the serious followers from the day trippers I reckon it was probably working by this point. And as we look at the story today, how do we respond? We have a chance to weigh up the cost in our own minds and lives, knowing what has gone before. This may help us to decide that we do want to know the life-giving love of Christ, or we may decide that it is too high a price to pay. Although we know what has gone before, we do not know what lies ahead, and this is the challenge to us. We are asked to follow Christ our creator and redeemer into unknown places, trusting in the unfailing love of Christ. The unknown is frightening, but Christ is our liberator from fear, and promises to walk beside us all the while. And if it is a struggle to put Christ first, if it is a struggle to take the risky step of following Christ, then it is not meant to be easy. To struggle is not an indicator of failure; it indicates that we are truly alive.
Verse 33 reads: ‘So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.’ When Christ says give up your possessions to follow me, it is both a warning and an invitation. It is a warning to us not to put our life in the hands of unfulfilling meaningless possessions. Yet it is an invitation to us to find freedom from fear which urges us to find security in possessions. When I lived in Zimbabwe, I was so lucky to experience the incredible hospitality and generosity that people practised. When visiting a family for a meal, one of the few chickens owned by the family would be killed in preparation for the meal, just because you had arrived, and this would be gladly shared even though there was very little food to go round. And even more care would be taken to make sure that you, the guest, would be given the largest helping, whether you had the greatest need or not. And after the meal was over and the evening finished, I would often find myself leaving with a present in my hand, either a picture or ornament taken from the house or a piece of jewellery taken from one of the family. I had never experienced anything quite like it, even though I grew up knowing, understanding and practising generosity. And all of this would be done despite the poverty that people lived in. They had so, so little to give and yet they gave so much of what they had. Now perhaps this could be called reckless by some. Using so much for one meal that could have been used for four. But I began to see this as one of the healthiest attitudes to possessions that I have experienced. There was an active decision to share what they had and a healthy disregard of ownership as we understand it in the West. And I believe that when we are able to let go so freely of our possessions we break down any barriers that have been formed between us and God. When we let go of our security in possessions, we can transfer our trust to Christ. I believe there is a direct correlation, the more that we invest in possessions, the less we invest in Christ. Possessions, we are told, can meet our every need. Advertising has gradually evolved into a finely oiled machine, selling us products because we’re worth it. We can buy beauty in bottles, instead of realising that we already are beautiful in the sight of God. We can buy books that tell us how to live, what clothes to wear, who to go out with, where to go on holiday, what outfits to wear at the airport, what to drink on the plane. We don’t have to make any decisions any more, they are all written down somewhere. We are sold lifestyle packages, people like us do this, say that, eat here, and the scary thing is that none of us are immune to this. Even those of us who consider ourselves alternative are able to acquire our alternative possessions, our alternative lifestyles just as easily today. Possessions gradually move into our lives and take over more and more time and energy which we spend acquiring, adoring, adorning, purchasing, polishing and protecting. Is this time well spent? Is this our energy best used? Is this real life, or are we just playing at living? Fortunately for us we have got a better offer from Christ. We have got the chance to truly live, in Christ’s love, in relationship with our creator. Discovering the true beauty of our world and of ourselves as we walk the journey beside him. And lucky for us, we have regular warnings in the Bible about our tendency to get carried away with possessions. Possessions can form a barrier between us and Christ. I’m sure we have all felt that desire to keep what is ours, to hold onto it, to protect it, to own it. We want to know that it belongs to us and we want others to know that it belongs to us. I know this feeling very well, every time I see Hannah walking down the stairs in some item of clothing of mine. I have to struggle with the whole idea of possessions before I see another T-shirt disappear into the abyss that is Hannah’s room. But if I were to keep tight hold of my possessions, and not share them with Hannah, then this would form a wall between us, there would be a barrier that would build up over time. And although the effects of this might not be apparent at first, resentment would be built up and we would certainly not have reached the depth of friendship that we have now. This is how we build intimacy, this is how we build trust, this is how we walk from slavery into freedom, this is how we find life over death, by giving all that we own to God. When Jesus delivers this line about possessions, you can imagine a few other people sneaking off from the crowd. This isn’t what they had come to listen to, nor is it what they had bargained for. No one had said anything about donkey sharing or co-operative vineyards before. By the end of this particular story, I imagine that there were only a few people left. Some would go back to families mumbling how ‘he wants us to start hating each other now’. Others would go chat to friends saying ‘bloody hippy, wants me to give everything I’ve worked for away’. And maybe there were a few left:
And to them I imagine Jesus said: ‘Come, let’s go and we’ll work it out together.’ Copyright © 2004 Ruth Hutchison This page was last updated on Wednesday, 8 September 2004home | about all hallows | what’s on | worship and prayer | discussion and reflection | action in the community | projects | an open, welcoming … | weekly bulletin | site map | search site | admin | |