A sermon on Luke 14:25-33 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon is available here.

The words we heard from Jesus in tonight’s gospel reading are some of the most perplexing of all his teachings. Some of them are so shocking when taken at face value that all that preachers can usually manage to do with them is try to explain them away with a kind of “what he really meant was …” approach.

I actually want to focus more tonight on the issues in the second part of what he had to say, but this first part is so shocking that now that we’ve heard it read, I can’t really just leave it hanging in the air without comment. Jesus says that you can’t be his disciple unless you hate your father and mother, your siblings, and your spouse and children. This is linked with the idea of being willing to carry your own cross, but the link is neither explained nor self-evident. How can Jesus tell us that we are to love even our enemies, and then turn around and tell us that we are to hate our nearest and dearest? 

The usual “what he really meant was …” approach is to say that Jesus is setting up a contrast here, and that your love for God is to be so whole-hearted and single-minded that by comparison it will be as though you hated everyone else. While that might be true enough in itself, I don’t think that is an adequate explanation for what Jesus says. I don’t think that that point on its own would require such shocking hyperbole. There must be something more to it. The something more is, I think, a social dimension that can be well illustrated from recent politics. And while this is not the main thing I want to focus on tonight, it will help us segue to it.

There are many many Jewish people who are wholeheartedly opposed to the Israeli invasion and destruction to Gaza, and more generally opposed to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. Such anti-war Jews can be found all around the world, but they are probably an even higher proportion of the population in Israel itself. And the primary strategy that is employed against them by the Israeli regime and its supporters is to accuse them of being self-hating Jews, people who hate their own people. 

Now I’m not suggesting that what Jesus is saying is only relevant if your loved ones are perpetrating international war crimes, but I hope you recognise the social dynamic at play here. Jesus is not commanding us to hate anyone, but he is saying that part of the cost you need to factor in if you want to follow him is that the more fully you do that, the more others will see you as a traitor who has turned against the interests and values of your own people and even your own family.

There are people who were involved with last weekend’s “March for Australia” who would be likely to make the same accusation here. They would say that the love and hospitality we seek to show to migrants and refugees shows that we hate Australia and its heritage and culture, and that we don’t care about the welfare and future of our own loved ones.

So while I don’t think Jesus wants us to feel or express hatred for anyone, I do think he calls us to stand for the kind of radical, all-inclusive, boundary breaking love that is more than likely to prove such an offence to the values of many around us, perhaps even our own families, that we will be accused of hating our own.

That then leads on to the second half of the passage where Jesus illustrates this idea of counting the cost. And although this second half doesn’t have anything like the shock value of the first part, it seems to me that there is an apparent contradiction here that is quite perplexing in itself. 

Jesus uses two illustrations, back to back. In the first one, he says that if you were undertaking a building project, you’d do a proper costs projection and secure your finance before you started so as to ensure you don’t make a goose of yourself by running out of money with the thing only half built. The second one is very similar. If you are a ruler or military commander preparing for war, the most important part of your preparations will be to evaluate whether your military resources are sufficient to match it with those of your enemy. If you’ve got no chance, then seek terms of peace before the fighting begins. 

The illustrations are simple and perfectly clear. Count the cost. Count the cost. Don’t put yourself in a position where you are going to come up short and fail through lack of foresight. Count the cost.

But do you see the problem here? These two illustrations of counting the cost imply that we are aiming to be successful winners, and we should avoid embarking on things that are likely to end in failure. Don’t start a building project unless you are sure it will succeed. Don’t enter a conflict unless you are sure you can win. Plan for success and so avoid failure. And yet the life Jesus is calling us to follow him in is one that is almost certain to be seen as a total failure.

If you were to examine how well Jesus went in living up to this advice about planning ahead to avoid failure, you’d have to conclude that he did very badly indeed. “Evaluate the forces arrayed against you.” Even though Jesus seems quite aware that he is thoroughly outgunned, and even though plenty of people warn him that if he goes to Jerusalem and continues to provoke the religious and political establishment there he will come to a sticky end, he goes right on doing it. He sets his face to Jerusalem, and he won’t shut up. And sure enough he ends up as the most socially conspicuous failure you could be in that society – strung up naked on a post to die slowly on the side of a main road where everyone could witness his humiliation.

So, by the measure of his own illustrations here, Jesus seems to have got it badly wrong. He set out to overcome the corruption and cynical exploitation of the prevailing religious system and to bring a revival of faithful discipleship to Israel, but he largely failed. He never had more than a few dozen rag-tag followers, and he ended up humiliatingly dead. If he was weighing up what he was up against, he either badly miscalculated or he didn’t follow his own advice here about not starting things if the most likely outcome is failure.

So did Jesus get it all wrong? Or is the guidance he gives here something that is applicable in some contexts and not others? What are we to make of it and how are we to know how to apply it to our own lives? I think that the answers to these questions may be closely related to the paradox itself.

The first thing that may help us is to remember that these illustrations are given in a particular context. They are not given out of the blue as some kind of universal principle. So they are definitely relevant to the issues in the specific context, but they may not be so relevant to other things. 

The particular context here is the one we heard in the first half of the reading with its shocking hyperbole about how following Jesus would appear to others to mean that we hate our own people, our own loved ones. Jesus linked that with the idea of carrying your own cross. “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Carrying your cross meant facing the likelihood of execution. In our day, we talk of signing your own death warrant. In some parts of the world, they might translate this as “Whoever is not willing to risk the ire of the death squads for following me cannot be my disciple.”

So in this context, these illustrations of planning ahead and calculating the cost relate directly to the likely costs of a commitment to following in the way of Jesus. And it is almost like a bit of mental gymnastics we have to do to make sense of it; Jesus is calling us to weigh up whether we have got what it takes to “succeed” at persevering in being seen as a failure, a loser, even a traitor to one’s own people.

If you are not going to be able to follow through on your commitment and “succeed” at following Jesus on the path of public failure, then maybe you shouldn’t bother pretending. Following Jesus involves trying to love the world into transformation, into becoming the culture of God. That proved impossible for Jesus. It will prove impossible for us. Jesus failed spectacularly and his life was seen as a waste. We will no doubt fail too and be written off as deluded losers. Are we up for that? Can we stick to that path despite the contempt we are likely to cop from others?

These questions are perhaps taking on a new kind of urgency in the world we live in today. There are forces of catastrophic change at work that are bigger and more powerful than any of us can do anything about. More and more of the world is falling under the influence of anti-democratic authoritarian politicians and uber-wealthy influential oligarchs who are recklessly smashing many of the institutions and social conventions that created what little stability we’ve had. Those same people are also the ones who have enough power and money to seriously address the climate crisis, but they are choosing to milk it for short term profit instead, and they’ve succeeded in concealing that behind the lie that the problem is little people like us not sorting our recycling properly and not getting rid of our cars.

Evolution has conditioned us to understand hope for the future as meaning surviving as long as we can and passing on our genes by bearing children and setting them up for a long, fertile, and prosperous future. That sort of hope for the future is probably lost now. We have passed the tipping point on catastrophic climate change, and we may well have passed the tipping point on the slide into political and social collapse too. 

Last week I spoke about that concept I learned in Georgia recently of responding to rising ugliness, not by aggressively protesting against the ugliness, but by creating projects of beauty. Jesus may have failed spectacularly in his quest to overcome the ugly corruption of the religious establishment, but in the face of that he created a project of beauty, a little rag-tag congregation who were committed to living the life of love to the max, regardless of the social cost and consequences.

For us now, living in a collapsing world where the question is no longer “is disaster coming?” but “how bad will it be?”, surely that is the call to us too, to build projects of beauty in the midst of it. At the other end of the spectrum, we will see frightened people arm themselves with guns and conspiracy theories, and shoot a few cops, and barricade themselves in caves with their immediate family to fight off anyone who comes for their last bucket of survival rations. Ensuring that they and their family survive as long as possible is still their only vision of the future.

But for us in this frightening world, taking up our cross might just mean accepting our own death in new ways. If the collapsing world runs out of food, then our projects of beauty (many of which I trust will be called churches) where we love our neighbours and our enemies and share our remaining resources generously and joyously may indeed mean that we are cutting short our survival and giving up our lives quicker, but that our remaining days will be filled not with anger and hostility, but with love and grace and deep beauty.

The choice to live beautifully in a collapsing world will require precisely the same sort of counting the cost that Jesus is talking about. We are called to plant trees and tend gardens and share food and sing songs and pray for change, but do we have what it takes to commit to that all the way even if it becomes clear that it won’t turn back the disaster? Do we have what it takes to commit to living beautifully even if it becomes clear that the angry preppers with their bunkers and guns will survive a few months longer than us? Maybe that is what “carrying your own cross” is going to look like for us, or for our children. I pray that it won’t, but it is looking increasingly likely.

This is why Jesus so often speaks of the commitment to following him as giving up our own lives. It is not wrong to think of that metaphorically, but it was meant literally first, and that’s where we have to start.

If we can only maintain a commitment to doing what is beautiful and right so long as we can still see a reasonable prospect that it will succeed in turning things around and ensuring our survival, then we haven’t yet arrived in the Jesus place of living life and love to the full even if life turns out to be no more than one of those flowers he pointed to, a thing of beauty today but withered and gone by tomorrow.

But if, with eyes fully open to the cost, we can commit to sharing whatever life we have in reckless acts of love and beauty and compassion and joy, then, regardless of what the world’s future may hold, we will find ourselves on the road with Jesus, on the road that passes by the way of death on the cross and on beyond into the wide open spaces of God’s love and life without limit. And whatever that may cost, it will be more than worth it.