Luke 14.25-33
Now large crowds were travelling with him; and he turned and said to them, ‘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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For 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? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” Or 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? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
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When I was younger I used to like watching Japanese animation (Anime). I would watch them with subtitles because obviously I can’t understand Japanese. Now there’s a thing with subtitles, sometimes they’re really bad, and you don’t really know what is happening. You spend most of your time thinking ‘what on earth are they going on about?’ rather than sitting and enjoying the show. Sometimes they’re good, you know exactly what’s going on, what one character is saying to another, the reason why this or that thing is happening etc. The best subtitles are the ones that allow you to enjoy a show as if you are a native speaker.
What makes a translation good or bad? It’s obvious, can the person reading or hearing the translation understand what the person is saying, or rather, they understand the ‘meaning’ of what is being said.
Say you have an idiom like, ‘there’s plenty more fish in the sea.’ if we are English, or have lived here for a while, we know what that means. Somebody’s relationship has ended for whatever reason, they’re chatting to a friend and they try to console them by saying, ‘don’t worry, there’s plenty more fish in the sea.’ But imagine if somebody who couldn’t speak English, and was unaware of our cultural norms. And they saw a ‘word for word’ translation of the conversation. They would probably see that one person is upset because of the end of the relationship, but then, why is the other person mentioning fish and the sea!
I think a good example of this is that famous line in, Casablanca, the classic emotional scene where Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman that famous last line ‘here’s looking at you kid.’ How would you translate that into another language?
This really matters, because if things aren’t translated or interpreted well then it create all kinds of wrong ideas. What Jesus says in our gospel reading today, on the face of it, looks very shocking. Jesus 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.’
So, we’d best start hating each other, after all that’s what Jesus says, right…?
No, of course not.
We need to be careful with the bible. The New Testament is a two-thousand-year-old text, from the eastern Mediterranean, written in Greek, and to a particular cultural context. Our job is to carefully untangle the web, and make sure we are interpreting the text well, so that we say what its truly saying. One writer once said that reading the bible is a lot like reading Shakespeare, you need to have a good commentary with you if you’re going to make sense of it, as otherwise you’re not going to understand what’s happening.
Ok, so what’s really going on in this passage? It can’t be that Jesus is saying that we must hate our family members, as that would completely contradict his other teachings about loving our neighbours. We need to understand what Jesus means by ‘hate’ this will unlock the meaning of the rest of the passage for us.
For us, hate is a visceral emotion, when you hate something, it’s rage, it’s powerful, its despising someone or some thing. It’s one of the most unpleasant and ugly feelings one could have. In a semitic context, however, the word means something more like ‘turn away’ and it doesn’t carry all the emotion weight that our word does. Jesus isn’t saying that we need to hate our family members. He is saying that to be his disciple, we need to be ‘all in.’ That ultimately, even the closest bonds we have shouldn’t get in the way of following Jesus.
Imagine you’re on a long journey, perhaps a walk up a mountain, you have your friends with you, you’re chatting with them, they help you when you stumble. You share the time together. But then the path gets difficult, there are chasms to jump over, the mountain becomes steep, people start to fall behind. Some get tired, or fed up, or moody. You may argue about which way is the best way up. Some people decide to stay where they are, or turn back and think ‘I’ve got better things to do than climb this mountain!’
The mountain is the journey of faith, the journey of self-emptying, the journey of, seeing all of life as the life of faith, to see all that we are and all that we have belongs to Jesus; heart, soul, body, mind, our possessions, our wants, our dreams our hopes. Take up your cross Jesus says, or in other words, don’t just, ‘turn away’ from others, but ‘turn away’ from ourselves, and our own selfishness, and our own darkness. It’s a gradual journey, and initially it may seem easy, but then the challenges and the trials come, and we have to decide whether we are to continue on the journey, or turn back and go back down the mountain.
Dying to oneself, after all, is hard, keeping going when everybody else has stopped or turned back, is even harder. Even if others, our nearest and dearest don’t make the full journey, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t press on for the prize, the pearl of great price.
The second part of the reading picks up on this, working out the cost of a building project, or working out if you can beat another army with the troops that you have. Jesus says, if you were building a tower, of course you would make sure you have the resources to do so. Or if you have to fight a battle you know that you need to make sure you have enough forces to defeat your enemy, if you don’t, you’re on the road to disaster.
‘So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.’
Have I really counted the cost? Is following Jesus a cost that I am willing to pay? do I have the resources to keep going, trusting in God, praying for his provision, spending time with fellow Christians, turning to God in all areas of our lives not just when it’s difficult. I’m asking myself this question as much as I’m asking anybody here. And it’s a question that only we as individuals can answer. We may be summoned at any time to literally give up everything for Jesus, and the disciple needs to be able to do this, because following Jesus, isn’t just one commitment among many; rather it redefines the relationship with have with all our other commitments and takes complete primacy.
There is a great contemporary Christian song by a band called Rend Collective called ‘The Cost’ And in the refrain, the following lyric repeats…
‘I’ve counted up the cost, and you are worth it.’
Whenever I hear this line, I think about it in two different ways. I think about it in the cost to me, what I’ve given up to follow God’s call on my life, what I may eventually be called to give up, will I still say that Jesus is worth it?
Here’s the another way I look at that line. I imagine Jesus saying the words instead ‘I’ve counted up the cost, and you are worth it.’ I was whipped and beaten, I was crowned with thorns, I carried my cross up a hill and died, and I did it for you because you, are worth it.’
This is ultimately what Christianity is all about, Jesus looks at his world, and each and every one of us, he looks us in the eyes.
‘I know how much this is going to cost me to save you, it’s a heavy price, but I pay it glady, because you are worth it.
Is Jesus worth following with all your heart, soul, mind or strength? We need to make that decision for ourselves, but look to his life, death and resurrection, and his impact on your own life. I think it is there that you will find the ans
Amen
