The Cost of Discipleship (Luke 14:25-33)

In 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, published a book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. It became a Christian classic and it was required reading when I was a seminarian. In his book, he attacked the modern Christian tendency toward what he called “cheap grace.” He was not the first to use the term, but he used it more effectively than anyone before him.
What is “cheap grace?” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. It is grace without discipleship, without the cross, without Jesus Christ. Or to put it more clearly, it is to hear the gospel preached as follows: ‘Of course you have sinned, but everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are.’”
Bonhoeffer openly and powerfully condemned the acculturated Christianity of Hitler’s Germany, which was busy compromising with and conforming to Naziism. And what happened to him as a result of his preaching and his undercover participation in plotting against Hitler was his own cost of discipleship.
In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo. He spent the next two years in prison with the Gestapo trying to break him and induce him to become a more conciliatory voice. He refuse to recant. Instead, he defied them and openly admitted that he was an implacable enemy of Hitler and of Naziism and he would never change his mind about either. And so, in April 1945, with American forces closing in on the concentration camp where he was being held, the Nazis hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One report said he was hanged with a thin wire in a manner that would cause him to strangle. Another said he was hanged from a tree in the camp. The cost of his discipleship was ignominious death at the hands of evil men.
If you will look on page 78 in your pew Bibles, you will see that the passage I have read to you is set off as a separate paragraph (pericope) with the title The Cost of Discipleship. I could think of no better title for this sermon.
I.
What does it mean to speak of the “cost of discipleship?” There are two words here: cost and discipleship. Jesus is saying, “You can not be my disciple free; it is going to cost you something.” And he proceeds to shock the crowd by telling them how much it is going to cost them.
As Luke the gospel writer tells the story, Jesus was being followed by a large crowd of people on this, his final, fateful journey to Jerusalem…Jerusalem, where he would pay his own cost of discipleship.
There were two types of people in the crowd. On the one hand, there were those in the multitude, wanting to be on hand for the grand opening of the kingdom Jesus had been preaching about. They were thinking of it, unfortunately, as a renewal of the earthly kingdom of David. They probably thought it was going to be a day of glory, rewards and rejoicing for all. There would probably be dancing in the streets, singing, feasting--a great, grand national party.
In the second group were the disciples and a few others who perceived, however dimly, that Jesus was about more serious business--a lot more serious-- than dancing in the streets. But even some of them, too, thought that perhaps this was going to be the long-awaited day when God, through Jesus, was to unveil finally the promised kingdom that would result in the great religious revival of the Jewish people.
Jesus had tried before to bring both groups down to earth. And here, in today’s reading, we find him stopping to speak one more time, to make one more effort to get the people who were following him to understand that stark realities awaited everyone who would follow him in the dark days that he knew lay ahead.
And so Jesus asked them, “Have you counted the cost of discipleship? Are you willing to pay it?” It is a question we, too, must answer.
What is the cost for us? Is it to make ourselves get up every Sunday morning and get dressed for church when we would rather stay home in our pajamas and read the Sunday paper? Is it to be nice to some of our fellow church members and act as if we are a lot more interested in them than we really are? Is it to put a little something in the collection plate on a regular basis, even if it sometimes makes us quietly say “ouch?”
Jesus said that the cost of discipleship is a lot stiffer than any of that. His words to the crowd were shocking. “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.”
“Hate” is a shocking word, and as it is used here simply does not mean what we usually mean by it. In fact, our understanding of the word applied to its use in this passage does not make sense. The Greek word as used here is a term of comparison. It is a way of expressing willingness to be detached from or to turn away from something or someone, even from family members, who may want us to go in a different direction.
Will Willimon, who was chaplain at Duke University for years, once told a group of pastors that he had never had a call from parents saying, “Help us, please. Our son is misbehaving.” But hardly a year went by, he said, when he did not get a call from parents saying something like, “Chaplain, can you help us? Our son (or daughter) has gone overboard with some religious group and wants to go off to Haiti and work in some literacy training program after graduation. And we want him (or her) to go to law school.”
Is such a student, in effect, “hating father and mother” in order to heed the call of Christian discipleship? Yes--in the sense that the student is willing to face the terrible tension between discipleship and the ambitions his or her parents have for their child. It is not a negative matter of not liking or loving one’s parents; rather it is a matter of choosing a higher loyalty.
Jesus is a kind man, and he said to the people, “I know you mean well.” “But,” he continued, “you must understand that if you really mean to be one of my disciples, you are going to have to pay some rent on the job.” The currency in which that rent must be paid will be work and sacrifice. The rewards from doing that job will be in hearing your Savior say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
II.
Jesus said to the people then and says to us now, a discipleship that costs you nothing is not really a discipleship; it is only a pretense. Good intentions are not enough; they must be proven with good deeds. Right beliefs must always be borne out by right conduct.
What does it mean to us, then, to be disciples? And how much will it cost us?
The true disciples of Jesus are those who live out the great commandment of Jesus, which is to love God and to love people--utterly. This means right decisions that result in right actions, commitment that is proven in service and consecration that is observable in one‘s life--or it means nothing at all.
By decision, I mean to really mean what we are saying when we sing “Here I am, Lord. I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”
Commitment is to truly mean what we are saying when we sing, “I love thy kingdom, Lord.”
Consecration means that we mean what we are saying when we sing, “Take my life and let be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”
Jesus taught us that to love God is know God as our Creator, and to love God as our heavenly Father. And to understand God as Creator and Father is to be sensitive to God’s active presence in the world.
It is to be driven to our knees, as I am, when we consider the heavens, the work of God’s hands. When I seek and find through my telescope some tiny smudge of light that I know to be another galaxy with a hundred billion suns in it, I am in awe of God’s handiwork. But I am no less awed when I lift my eye from the eye piece to throw back my head and behold the canopy of the starlit sky God has spread above us. It is then that I ask in wonder, “Who are we, that you are mindful of us?” The answer that comes to me is, “You are my children and I love you.”
To love God our Father in return means to find the strength and purpose in our lives to worship him intently, to pray to him believingly, and to follow where the Holy Spirit leads us through the words of scripture and the promptings of our brothers and sisters in the church.
To love people means to acknowledge them as our fellow children of God, made in God’s image just as we are. It is to look at other people with trust and understanding--and if they fail and fall, with compassion and forgiveness.
To love people as Jesus loves them is not to engage in some kind of syrupy sentimentality. It is to refuse to be walled off from any of God’s children by hatred, prejudice, fear or class distinction, and to try by every means at our disposal to build creative relationships with them. It is to enter into the arena of public action and commitment on behalf of causes we believe in, and on behalf of persons who need help. It is to take on other people’s problems as our problems, to share as much as we are able in finding solutions to those problems.
I have told this story before, but I am going to tell it again. It is the story of a lady who served as a Vista Volunteer, in the Domestic Peace Corps, and worked at helping poor, elderly and mostly uneducated people in a large and populous county navigate through the bureaucratic mazes that sometimes separated the people from the help they needed. County officials announced one day changes in procedures that this lady felt would work to the detriment of her poor and elderly clients. And so she went from office to office in the county office building to protest the proposed changes. The changes were canceled, and one county official gave as the reason, “Because Mrs. Swann raised so much hell.”
Well, let me not close on that note. She’ll be angry enough as it is, on the way home. Let me close instead with a note about David Livingstone, one of the most famous Christian missionaries and able Christian leaders of all time. He said that his motto had been “Fear God and work hard.” And he said of his career, “That is all I have ever done.” Let us all fear God and work hard--and we will find that the cost of discipleship is well within our ability to pay it. Amen.