Parables 1c. Distraction

The seeds that fell among the thorns represent those who hear the message, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life. And so they never grow into maturity.

Luke 8:14

If passion is the experience and the obsession of youth, as I wrote about in my previous reflection on this parable, cares, riches and pleasures are the distractions of later life. The reality seems to be that as much as we talk it up, and as long as it may last, passion for a thing or person eventually fades. The thing or person is no longer interesting, it (or they) no longer monopolises our attention. Our eyes and our minds wander, looking for a new thing or person to be passionate about, but perhaps it is not a thing or person that we really desire, but the feeling of passion itself. We long to fall in love again, because we remember the wonder, the intoxication, of that heady feeling. We do anything to try to recreate the feeling, but getting it back is elusive…

It is easier to get stuff than to get feelings, and sometimes stuff gives us those heady feelings as a bonus, even if they are temporary. We live in a materialistic world, in which we pursue wealth and pleasure with almost religious fervour, dreaming of the happiness if we will have when we just get that one more thing.

Yet we all know the emptiness that often comes after we get the things we want, the creeping meaningless as we look at all our possessions, our healthy bank balance, our new car or boat or house, as we find ourselves wondering what the point of it all is, the let down that so often follows the “holiday of a lifetime.” Yet rather than question the pursuit, we go after something else, as if the next thing we get, whether it is an object, a person, or an experience, will finally give us the fulfilment or excitement or comfort or security that we crave.

These are the distractions of life. Jesus says they crowd out the message, just as thorns and weeds will choke the important, the beautiful, plants in a garden, causing them to wither and die. In a garden we put a lot of effort into getting rid of thorns and weeds, to allow the flowers to thrive, to allow the plants to bear fruit. Why do we let them grow in the seedbed of our hearts?

Jesus does not just mention riches and pleasures here, but also the cares of life, the worries, the anxieties, the fears. Just as we all know the emptiness that can come as we look at all we have attained, accumulated, achieved, we also know the anxiety can come as we look at how little of things we have managed to get. This too can choke the message. Just as we live in an age of materialism, we live in an age of anxiety. Is not this anxiety so often a response to comparison with others, with an ideal of life to which we are painfully aware we can never measure up? For young people it is often about comparing themselves to the beauty, or popularity, or success of their peers. For older people it can just as easily be about comparing themselves to the status, or possessions, or achievements of those around them, or the image projected by the world of what a successful life should look like.

We can easily be deceived at many levels in this life. We believe the lie that being a certain way, looking a certain way, living a certain way, having the right friends, the right stuff, will result in happiness and fulfilment, and we spend the energy of our lives either striving to get those things, or else obsessing over being unable to get them, for whatever reason. All this effort and obsessing hardly leaves time or energy for the message of Jesus. It is simply choked out.

People fall away. They lose their first love. Jesus’s disciples could see it. We see it. Jesus explains it with this parable. First they (we) are deceived, into believing that certain things will satisfy. Then they (we) are distracted by the never ending pursuit of getting those things. Or we are weighted down the anxiety that we can never get them. In the end we forget the message of Jesus: the message that says only he can satisfy, the message that says true happiness is found only in being reconciled to the Creator and following his directions for life, the message that says the greatest problem in the world is not lack of material possessions or worldly success, but the darkness in our own hearts. We listen instead to the messages delivered by the world and the devil, the enemies of Jesus, the message of materialism.

According to Jesus the cares and riches and pleasures of this life are like weeds and thorns in a garden. If we let them grow, if we don’t pull them out, throw them onto the scrap heap, incinerate them, they will choke the flowers and fruits in our gardens. The challenge is to see them, to recognise them for what they are, and to deal with them before they destroy the thing of beauty that was once planted in our hearts, but which can so easily be choked and destroyed.

A mature, well tended garden is a thing of joy. Let’s attain to that.

Parables 1b. Short term faith

The seeds on the rocky soil represent those who hear the message and receive it with joy. But since they don’t have deep roots, they believe for a while, then they fall away when they face temptation.

Luke 8:13

Why do some people start so well as Christians and yet a few years down the track appear to have left the faith? They had heard the message and had “received it with joy.” It made sense to them, all this talk of God and his kingdom, of salvation and new beginnings, of a new life lived by God’s values and wisdom and not their own. They had “prayed the prayer,” gone forward at the meeting to “receive Jesus,” started going to church, signed up for a home Bible study group. Everything was exciting, and full of promise.

But when temptation came they chose another path. They may not even have noticed it. Though the process may have been sudden, it may have been slow, a gradual departure, but the end result was the same – a few months, or a few years down the track, they were no longer interested in the things that had, at first, given such joy to their souls. Something, or someone, else had usurped their attention; something or someone else had become the source of their joy. Jesus and his message no longer “did it for them.”

It does not have to be things that we naturally see as sin that tempt us – gluttony, or laziness, avarice or lust, to name a few of the so called “seven deadly sins” – though all of those kind of things, with their nuances and variations, are there in abundance in our world. Temptation is a process that affects us all in which our thoughts are drawn away from that which is most important towards something that is, in that moment, most attractive. It is an unseen pressure we experience to look in a different direction, follow a different path, to depart from our first love.

But why not follow that new path, if we have indeed found something or someone that offers more happiness, more excitement, more fulfilment? Doesn’t it make perfect sense to do so? Why should we imagine that Jesus is somehow the one and only if we have found something more satisfying? Why do we lose interest in Jesus? Has he changed, become less attractive? Has his message become less compelling, less true? Or is it just that the life that Jesus calls us to is too restrictive, too narrow, too boring?

I liken this process to the phenomenon we call infatuation. Many of us have experienced this. We meet someone, we “fall in love,” we are overwhelmed by emotions that we barely understand, we just know that we like the feeling, we are “in heaven.” The object of our infatuation is perfect, the realisation of all our dreams, the source of all happiness, and we can think of nothing else. All we want is to be close to that person, to look at them, to listen to them, to experience the wonder of their presence. It is intoxicating.

But at some point the feelings start to fade, just as the intoxication of a drinking spree passes. After a night of drinking at best you feel nothing, at worst you have a hangover, a throbbing headache, sick to the stomach, a bad taste in the mouth. The passing of an infatuation is more likely to be the first of these, an emptiness, a vague disappointment. The thing – or person – that was everything to us, seems to have become nothing to us. But we long to get the feeling back, that heady intoxicated feeling of being in love. Or in the case of alcohol, being inebriated. We are tempted to do it all again, whether with a new lover or another bottle.

Perhaps the greatest temptation we face in our contemporary world is not to another person, or another drink, but to the pursuit of good feelings. Yet the pursuit of happiness is seldom seen as a bad thing in our world. We live in an age when we understand good to be a feeling to be somehow grasped, to be possessed. If something feels good, it must be good. We call this feeling happiness. The pursuit of good feelings becomes the purpose of our existence. When something stops making us feel happy, or feeling at all, we look to something or someone else that will. It doesn’t take much reflection to realise how potentially dangerous this belief could be. Yet it is the spirit of the age, and it is hard to resist the temptation to follow that path.

Jesus does not deny the existence of infatuation. He does not even suggest that infatuation in itself is bad. He does not say that feeling good is a bad thing. After all, isn’t that what he means when he says “they hear the message and receive it with joy.” But it is quickly clear from what he says that those first feelings of joy are not enough to sustain a life of faith, just as the infatuation of a romantic relationship ship is not enough to sustain a lifelong marriage. It may be desired, but it is not sufficient.

What is needed is something Jesus describes as “deep roots.” These are what will give strength to resist temptation. These are what makes a life of faith possible. Deep roots means moving past the pursuit of happiness, the obsession with good feelings. It means coming to understand the deep joy of knowing God, which is about him and not about us. When we are infatuated, although we tend to think it is the other person with whom we are in love, we soon realise that it the feelings invoked by the other person that make us happy. When the feelings fade, our interest in the other person fades. We look for someone else who can provide the same reaction within us. We are in love with being in love.

If we are to move from infatuation to love in any relationship we need to grow roots that are deeper than good feelings. We need to get to know and appreciate the real person, not the person of our fantasy. We need to commit ourselves to a relationship which sometimes brings happiness and sometimes brings pain. We need to become focussed on the happiness of the other person, not on our own happiness. We need, in short, to grow up and leave our self-obsession, replacing it with other-person centredness. The same is true of our relationship with Jesus.

But how do we get these deep roots? We need to pray, we need to study, we need to meditate on the life and teachings of Jesus. If it is available we would do well to seek help from others who have already walked this road. Some who are reading this may be people who are already turning to other things for the joy they once experienced in meeting Jesus. To you I say turn back, grow deeper roots, because Jesus will satisfy. Others will be people who have survived the temptations of life, who already have the deep roots needed to nourish a lifetime of faith. To you I say you have a responsibility to help others to grow. Whoever we are we need to constantly dry out to the Holy Spirit to help us grow, because he is the only effective fertiliser for this process.

Parables 1a. Blinded

This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is God’s word. The seeds that fell on the footpath represent those who hear the message, only to have the devil come and take it away from their hearts and prevent them from believing and being saved.

The disciples of Jesus had accepted him, “hook, line and sinker.” They had believed in him, they trusted him, they had “put their faith in him.” But as more and more people were exposed to the message of Jesus, the disciples couldn’t help noticing that different people responded to Jesus in different ways, with a variety of results. They wondered why what was so clear to them, so compelling, so life changing, appeared to have no effect on some others at all.

This parable, the story of a farmer scattering seed, is Jesus’s answer to that question. In the story, Jesus describes four responses to God’s word. He begins quite simply by saying, “the seed is God’s word.” He explains that the question of whether that seed grows into a fruitful plant or not depends on the soil on which it falls, and on what else is growing in the soil when it falls. Soils, like people, are different: some soil is hard, some is shallow, some is deep and fertile. It is interesting to reflect on the different outcomes of the scattered seed when we find ourselves asking the same question as the disciples – why does the message of Jesus transform some people’s lives, while the same message seems to be “like water off a ducks back” for others, making little if any impact?

Jesus starts with an idea which is hard for modern Western readers to swallow, because it deals with the supernatural. Jesus said simply that the reason some people were unaffected by his message was that the devil was blinding them, “preventing them from believing and being saved.” Such a statement was easy for first century disciples to accept, because it was consistent with their worldview. They were not confined by the naturalistic worldview that prevails in our time, but were quite comfortable with the idea that there was a supernatural dimension to existence which, though unseen, was every bit as real as that which could be physically experienced. When Jesus said that the devil was blinding people’s eyes, hardening their hearts, it made sense to the disciples.

It is perhaps harder for us. All this talk of devils, supernatural evil beings opposed to God, is discomforting to say the least. Some modern readers, when they get to accounts of the devil and his demons in the New Testament, discount the whole Bible narrative as superstitious nonsense, belonging with other worldviews grounded in ignorance and fear. The modern Western mind has instead given its allegiance to scientific rationalism, the belief that things that cannot be seen and measured in some concrete way, simply do not exist. The devil and his demons belong in this category for many modern minds. God does too, even if the existence of the historical Jesus is hard to deny.

Jesus, however, had a different view of the world. He spoke quite openly and unapologetically about the devil. The way he speaks suggests he saw this devil as having the power to influence the minds – the perception – of ordinary people. He makes clear in this parable that the reason that his message had no effect on some people was simply because of this phenomenon.

What are we to make of all this? We “modern” Christians are affected by the world around us. We are caught between these two mindsets – the contemporary and the ancient. Are we to accept Jesus’s explanation or do we try to explain it away as purely Jesus’s adaptation of the truth to the particular historical and cultural context into which he was born? Do we believe in angels and demons? Do we believe in spirits? Do you? Do I? If we do, do we believe that they can interact with us in any way? Can we possibly believe that the reason some people reject Jesus, or just ignore him, is because the devil has blinded them, hardened their hearts? And if we do believe such things, what are we to do about it? If we don’t believe it, what alternative explanation can we give that for some people the message of Jesus seems to be completely meaningless and irrelevant?

When I became a Christian I decided that I would accept what Jesus said as not just true for his time and his people, but absolutely true for all times and all peoples. I decided that I would believe all the supernatural stuff that I find in the Bible, as much as I believe all the “natural” stuff. For some, this signified that I had lost my mind, that I had surrendered my reason, that I had bought into superstitious nonsense. Whatever.

For me, on the other hand, it explains a lot, not just the phenomenon that Jesus describes here, of some people being unable to accept the teachings and claims of Jesus. Any who might read this must make their own decision. The question is, of course, how free are we to make our own decision in such things?

For those of us who desire to see the world around us – our nearest and dearest, as well as those who we don’t even know – accept Jesus and all he said and did, this teaching of Jesus has another implication: we must stand against the devil and his schemes. We must do what we can to prevent people’s minds from being closed by spiritual forces they do not comprehend. We must stand against devils and demons in whatever way we know how. We must do what we can to create a place where people can hear Jesus, can see him, and can respond to him unfettered by evil forces.

Some Christians call such actions “spiritual warfare.” Non-Christians laugh at such concepts. How to engage in spiritual warfare is not something that Jesus goes into here, so neither will I, but if we care for the world around us, it is something we need to become familiar with.

There are, however, some simple lessons about the devil we can learn from this parable: first, a devil exists, second, that his purpose is to keep people away from God, and third, that he can influence the hearts and minds of ordinary people. It may be a challenge for those of us who have bought into contemporary Western thinking to accept these ideas. However, they were spoken by Jesus so it would seem he believed them; they were recorded by Luke the doctor, so it would seem that he too accepted them. If we are followers of Jesus it would make sense for us to believe these ideas too. It will make a difference to how we live our lives.

I believe the modern world has lost much by ditching the worldview of Jesus. The so called “Enlightenment” has, I believe, paradoxically done much to plunge this world into darkness, even if historians see it as a period of human history that released the world from enslavement to superstition and fear. Perhaps the devil’s greatest triumph in the march of human history has been to convince human beings that he doesn’t exist.

Parables 1. Faith first

While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.” When he said this, he called out, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” His disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,“ ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand …

Luke 8:4-10 NIV

Luke’s gospel contains 17 of the parables of Jesus. They are well known, and variations of some of them are repeated in other gospels. The parable quoted above is the first recorded in Luke, and introduces us to the idea of parables, and the question of why Jesus chose this way of teaching so much of the wisdom of the kingdom.

For us who are Christians this parable is well known, and we have no doubt heard it explained many times, so that its meaning seems almost self evident. We wonder at the ignorance of the disciples, who asked what this parable meant. Isn’t it obvious?

Apparently not, and that, it seems, was Jesus’s intention. He quotes an obscure verse from the prophet Isaiah – recorded in chapter six of that Old Testament book. It does seem odd. Jesus seems to be saying that he spoke in parables so that people would not hear, not see, not understand the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, not so that they would. This seems counterintuitive. We naturally imagine that Jesus was using parables because it would make it easier for his listeners to understand, not so it would be harder.

He goes on to say that his disciples, by contrast, were to understand, and that is why he explained the parable to them. But why this exclusivity? Why not explain it for everyone? Why speak in riddles? Why leave the masses wondering?

Something that has become clear to me over the many years I have spent listening and talking to people is that what people believe about God – or indeed about anything – is seldom based on careful explanation, the presentation of evidence, profound teaching. What people believe is based on experience. They then interpret the world based on their beliefs. The only evidence they accept is that which supports their worldview. The only teaching that makes sense to them is that which goes along with their experience.

When it comes to ultimate truth, which comes only from God, people tend to only accept it and believe it if they have encountered God in some way, experienced him, met him – and having met him, said yes to him in their hearts and minds. That was the difference between the disciples who followed Jesus and the casual crowds that had gathered around him. The disciples had said yes to Jesus, they had put their faith in him.

Faith comes first, then understanding; I think that is what Jesus was saying. Jesus understood this basic fact of human psychology, that once faith exists, people’s minds are opened to the deeper things of God. This principle is true even if people put their faith in other people – once they have given their allegiance to a person, it is difficult to shake their trust, even if to everyone in the world that trust seems crazy. Witness the rise of Hitler, or in our present world, the faithful followers of Putin or Trump. For those that believe, nothing the person can do or say is wrong.

So we must choose carefully who we put our faith in, for if we choose wrongly, we will be led astray. The religious teachers of Jesus’s day said Jesus was a false teacher. But the disciples knew Jesus, they lived with him, they listened to him, they experienced his love, forgiveness, compassion, healing, and his power, and they made the decision to follow him and not the religious leaders. Having taken that step, Jesus opened the mysteries of his teaching to them. He will do the same for us.

Cost of discipleship 6. Everything

A large crowd was following Jesus. He turned around and said to them, “If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple. And if you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.
“But don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it? Otherwise, you might complete only the foundation before running out of money, and then everyone would laugh at you. They would say, ‘There’s the person who started that building and couldn’t afford to finish it!’
“Or what king would go to war against another king without first sitting down with his counselors to discuss whether his army of 10,000 could defeat the 20,000 soldiers marching against him? And if he can’t, he will send a delegation to discuss terms of peace while the enemy is still far away. So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own.
“Salt is good for seasoning. But if it loses its flavor, how do you make it salty again? Flavorless salt is good neither for the soil nor for the manure pile. It is thrown away. Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand!”

Luke 12:25-35 NLT

I have tried to imagine this scene. Luke includes the details. “A large crowd was following Jesus. He turned around and said…”

Jesus was a sensation. The things that he said made sense to the people who he spoke to. His presence demanded attention. His words pierced to the very core of people’s souls. He was an attractive person – in the sense that he attracted the people with whom he came in contact.

We are familiar with people like that. Think of the way the “paparazzi” chases after celebrities – royalty, or actors, or politicians, even criminals! Think of how the secular world (think Facebook) publishes the erudite reflections of thinkers, philosophers, writers. In the Christian world such people may be preachers, or writers, or great evangelists, the “high achievers of the kingdom.” Those of us who are “normal people” hang on their every word, we find ourselves part of the “crowd that is following them.”

Jesus’ way of responding to this phenomenon was rather different to us “normal humans.” In our modern materialistic, success driven world, we use popularity to exploit the market, to capitalise on the followers. We get people to “sign up” to whatever our particular agenda might be. It could be anything from watching our movies, to selling our books, to joining our political party – or our growing church! Mega-churches are a phenomenon of modern Western society, but I wonder how many of them have used the Jesus approach to church growth?

How does Jesus respond to his own popularity? He challenges people to count the cost. He says simply, “don’t join my cause unless you are sure, unless you are willing to give up everything, including all that is nearest and dearest to you.” It sounds quite shocking. But Jesus does not hold back. He talks about carrying a cross – an image that would have been familiar to people at a time when crucifixion was the standard Roman form of punishment – which would have meant, to his listeners, “be prepared to die.” He talks of losing family, friends, life itself. He states it simply and starkly: “you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own.” Whoa!!

When he talks of building a house only to run out of money, or starting a military campaign only to run out troops and equipment, he changes the focus a bit. Here he is speaking of that embarrassing situation for people who don’t count the cost, who realise halfway in that they have to abandon the cause. The message of the first part of his challenge is clear, but how do these examples apply to us? He has already said, “don’t join up unless you are willing to give up everything.” Now he says, “think how embarrassing it is to join a cause and then realise you were not willing to give up everything!” It seems as if he is trying to talk people out of joining his cause.

Why is he so negative? His approach is so different to ours. We say, “sign here and we’ll work out the details later.” Jesus says, “don’t sign here unless you are sure of what you are doing, unless you have read the fine print, unless you have seen the possible consequences of joining my cause, unless you know what it takes.” He is not exactly taking advantage of people carried away with their emotions. He is presenting cold hard facts. “This will be the costliest decision of your life. Think about it! And if you are not prepared for the cost, there’s time to pull out!”

It is easy to imagine that this is a challenge only for people who are still deciding what they will do with their lives, who are still weighing up whether they are going to follow Jesus. But what of older Christians, people (like me) who decided long ago that they would follow Jesus? Do we sometimes wonder if it was worth it? Do we sometimes want to cut our losses, accept the embarrassment, and abandon the call? Give it all up as a bad mistake? What does Jesus say to us? Have we become flavourless salt? Are we at the point where we are fit for nothing except to be thrown away?

I believe that Jesus challenges us the same way today as he did his followers back then. If we are still deciding, still weighing things up, then Jesus is uncompromising – he says don’t embark on this journey unless you are willing to lose everything, unless you are willing to give everything you are, everything you have, for the cause. It is a tall order. If we decided for Jesus long ago and are now wondering whether we made a terrible mistake, and are wondering what we can claw back of everything we have given up for the sake of following Jesus, Jesus says simply that if we go down that track, even if we get riches or fame, comfort or success, we will become flavourless salt, good for nothing but to be thrown away. Is that what we want our legacy to be?

Jesus bids us come and give up everything for him and his kingdom. If we are not willing to give up everything, then he gives us freedom to choose our own way in this world. If we were willing to give up everything, and we did choose Jesus’s way, but we are now having second thoughts, tired of “carrying the cross,” tempted to give it all up and pursue the “normal things” – comfort, security, pleasure – Jesus says clearly, “your life will mean nothing. Is that what you want?”

Would it have been better to have never embarked on this journey of faith? I think the answer for me is no, it was the right decision. I could have had a whole lot of things that now look very attractive and which tempt men to give up. But ultimately my life would have been meaningless, no matter what I had gained. And ultimately I would have lost everything, including my own soul. In another place Jesus says clearly, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and then loses his soul?” (Luke 9:25)

Cost of discipleship 5. Different

“I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me, and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished. Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other! From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against.
‘Father will be divided against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother;and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’”

Luke 12:49-53

These words seem not to fit into the overall narrative about Jesus. “Do you think I have come to bring peace on the earth? No. I have come to divide people against each other…”

But how does that fit with the Christmas angels? “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men…” Not to mention Paul the Apostle, who years later spoke repeatedly of the purpose of Christ’s coming, to bring all things together under one head, Jesus…? (See for example Ephesians 2:17)

What was Jesus getting at?

The only way I can come to terms with this passage is to understand Jesus’ words in another way. As if he said, “Do you think my coming will bring peace on the earth? No. It will divide people against each other.”

If read this way, then the words make sense and are consistent with the rest of the message of Jesus. Rather than being a statement of intent, they are a statement of the way things are, or at least a prediction of the way they will be. And if we are honest we know they are true.

For me, these words describe something of the cost of discipleship. As soon as we make the decision to follow Jesus it divides us from others – we are marked out as “Jesus people.” No matter what “groups” we belong to – family, schools, work, sport – we are suddenly different from all the others in the group. We are first and foremost followers of Jesus, and every other aspect of our identity is secondary.

This does not have to mean opposition, but all of us know that it often does. Father may well be divided against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother… and this is only the beginning. Others do not like it when our allegiance changes, tension and conflicts can arise. Our desire might well be that these others in our lives will decide to follow Jesus, but there is no guarantee of that, and those around us often take offense at our change of priorities. Jesus is quite upfront about that, but he challenges us nonetheless to make him number one in our lives.

Although putting our faith in Jesus may turn people against us, or make people avoid us or speak negatively about us, I don’t believe Jesus is here calling us as his followers to turn against others, to avoid them or to speak negatively about them. He is not calling us to stand as judge of the people around us. Jesus says clearly at another time, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Part of the challenge of following Jesus is the struggle to love those who think or behave differently, rather than to judge them.

But there is no doubt that even if we never speak a word of judgement toward our non-believing friends and family, our faith in Jesus will cause a rift, because people do not understand us. As the Apostle Paul wrote in a letter to a church some years later, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Cor 1:23) At best people may be puzzled and bewildered; at worst they will be angry and hostile.

This is the cost of following Jesus.

Cost of discipleship 4. Don’t look back

Fourth reflection about the cost of following Jesus.

Another said, “Yes, Lord, I will follow you, but first let me say good-bye to my family.”
But Jesus told him, “Anyone who puts a hand to the plow and then looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God.”

Luke 9:61-62 NLT

At first sight Jesus’ answer to this person seems unfeeling. After all, leaving everything to follow Jesus is no small thing. The potential follower has realised that he (or she) might never see his (or her) family again. They have realised the bigness of the commitment. They want to explain it to their family. They want to tell the family they love them. They want to reassure the family that it is not so much that they are rejecting them, but that they are accepting Jesus. Perhaps they even want to tell the family more about Jesus in the hope that they too might follow him. So why does Jesus respond the way he does, so seemingly harshly?

I don’t believe that Jesus is in the business of breaking up families, though I don’t doubt that Jesus was asking the person to give their first allegiance to him and the kingdom, which of course means relegating the family to second place. That can be hard for anyone who has grown up in a close and loving family, though for others it will be less of a demand.

Rather I believe Jesus is simply recognising the reality that we live in a world of competing demands, and it is easy to get distracted. He challenges the would be follower to single mindedness, to keeping their heart and mind fixed on the goal, the prize, and not to look to the right or the left.

Jesus was a Jew and he knew all about the Israelite tendency to look back to better times. He knew his people’s history, what had happened to them in the desert after their escape from Egypt. Their continual looking back to where they had come from, thinking only of the food supply and forgetting their slavery and hard labour, meant that they spent decades wandering in the desert when they could have reached the promised land in a few years if they had lived without regret. They became so focussed on what they had lost that they lost sight of what they had gained.

Jesus’ use of an agricultural metaphor would have appealed to his farmer listeners. The person who sets out to plow a field, he says, must not look back but keep their eyes fixed on a point far ahead at the other end of the field and just keep plodding on toward that point. Only then will the furrows be straight, and straight furrows make harvesting easier and result in a better yield. Looking back can easily mess things up.

Surely Jesus was responding to what he knew was (and is) a common human weakness, the tendency to look back and think that everything was better before. Old people understandably are more inclined to this than the young. But even young people commonly regret the decisions they have made. In fact, young people in our time are often afflicted by what I call “regret in advance,” which is equally problematic in getting them to move forward. They anticipate regret, fearful that they will choose the wrong path in life, and therefore afraid of committing to anything. They become paralyzed by indecision, and spend their lives in anxiety and fear. I suspect that Jesus, were he wandering around speaking to people today, would have as relevant a metaphor for the “commitophobes” as he did for the farmers of first century Israel.

Many years ago a young missionary, who subsequently lost his life taking the gospel to the unreached peoples of Ecuador, said something which often comes back to my mind. I cannot quote his exact words, but they were something like this – “he is no fool if he would choose to give the thing he cannot keep to buy what he can never lose.” What is it that God is asking me to give up today for his sake and the sake of the Kingdom? What are the things that make me want to look back, to go back?

We need to make Jesus our focus, not procrastinate, not be distracted, not look back, nor to the right or the left. Not regret, either in our looking backward or our looking forward. Keep our eyes focussed on the goal, and keep going towards it. It may seem like we are paying a high price, or that we are taking too big a risk, but why spend our lives on what we cannot keep, that which will wither and die, when the treasure in Jesus and his kingdom that lies ahead far outshines and outlasts anything else we might believe will give our life meaning or value?

Cost of discipleship 3. Leaving the “urgent”

The third in a series of reflections about the cost of discipleship.

He said to another person, “Come, follow me.”
The man agreed, but he said, “Lord, first let me return home and bury my father.”
But Jesus told him, “Let the spiritually dead bury their own dead! Your duty is to go and preach about the Kingdom of God.”

Luke 9:59-60

One of the things that easily distracts me from getting things done in life is my need to have everything organised before I start. I can spend the whole day just getting ready. I justify this by saying that this helps me to be focused on the task ahead, so that I won’t be distracted by everything else that is going on around me. But sometimes I wonder if I really enjoy the getting ready more than the task itself. I revel in the clearing of my desk but not so much the task at hand.

It is my own brand of procrastination – putting things off till later. Jesus knows that many people have a weakness in this area. This “other person” who came to him and said “first let me return home and bury my father” was one such person. Jesus knew that if the man left to bury his father he would never come back. He would intend to come back, he would intend to follow Jesus, but there would always be something else which he just needed to finish off before he got started.

Jesus’ answer sounds harsh, but Jesus knew this man well, even if he had just met him, and knew that procrastination was the greatest barrier to him becoming a disciple. He went straight to the heart of the matter for this man, and challenged him at his weakest point. I like to think this caused the man to reflect deeply on himself and his own personality and habits, and to go against his nature for once and follow Jesus even though he was not completely ready. But the man’s response is not recorded.

Sometimes, Jesus says, we have to leave things that seem important to us undone and get on with what is really important. Jesus challenges us to change our focus to preaching the Kingdom of God. That is the task at hand. That is the thing that will change the world around us (and ourselves in the process), That is the thing that can’t be put off. That is the thing that it is so often easy to think “later,” about.

I have heard stories about people who keep putting things off, who spend their life preparing. Suddenly they find themselves at death’s door and realise there are so many things they were going to do later that they haven’t done, and now there is no time left. They are filled with regret: “if only…” Like the person who constantly says no to people and activities because they have so much to do to prepare for later on – for retirement perhaps. They retire only to discover they have a terminal illness, and all those things they were going to do just never eventuate. It is too late.

May God deliver us from such a fate. May God deliver us from “the tyranny of the urgent,” and help us to focus on the task that is most important, the Kingdom of God. If you are procrastinating, putting off God till you have tidied up all the other things of life, then stop doing that and get on with what is important. As Jesus said, “let the dead bury their own dead.” Life may be untidy, full of loose ends. But Kingdom work is more important than tying up any of those threads.

Cost of discipleship 2. Homeless for the Kingdom

This is the second in a series of reflections around the cost of following Jesus.

As they were walking along, someone said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
But Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head.”

Luke 9:57-58 NLT

In Australia there is an obsession with acquiring real estate. “Owning your own home” seems to have become the purpose of life for many. Changing house prices and interest rates are like a spectator sport, occasioning either joy or despair, depending on your current circumstances. Once you have a home, of course, the focus changes to renovation and improvement, or the purchase of a second property, a holiday cottage or an investment. In Australia, we are obsessed with “a place to lay our heads.”

Jesus had no home, at least no earthly home. He was a carpenter – surely he could have built a house for himself, at minimal cost. Not something fancy or extravagant. Just somewhere to lay his head. He chose not to. His focus was on building not a house, but a kingdom. Real estate was simply not important to him. He called his followers to the same mindset.

An Australian friend recently visited Pakistan. He was there two weeks and travelled around with an evangelist stopping at villages where many had gathered to listen to the Christian gospel being preached. It was an exciting time for him, as he saw people’s hunger for the good news of the kingdom. What was the hardest thing, I asked him? Not having a decent bed, he said. At times he just had a string platform to lie on in the open air in the village centre. Wandering dogs scratched the ground beneath him. He had some covering and a mosquito net, but there were nights when he barely slept a wink and rose exhausted before dawn.

Is that what it means to follow Jesus? After two weeks my friend was back home in Australia, catching up on sleep. Jesus was still out there. How willing am I to adopt that kind of lifestyle? Just the thought stresses me out. Following Jesus can be hard.

Does that mean that a true follower of Jesus will be homeless? Sometimes, certainly, but I don’t think that was the point Jesus was trying to make. Absolutely we need to be ready to be homeless for his sake. We need to be willing to have nowhere to lay our heads. But I think that Jesus’ main point was simply that our focus should never be on real estate, or renovation or home decoration, or house prices, or the next property. Those things may or may not be there, in our lives, but if they are they should be on the blurred periphery. Our focus, the centre of our gaze, should always be on our Father God and his kingdom, whatever our current circumstances. We need to be ready to sacrifice all, give up everything, for him.

Cost of discipleship 1

The central chapters of Luke’s gospel contain much teaching about what is involved in following Jesus. One aspect of this, to which Jesus refers on a number of occasions, is the cost of following him. He does not mince words, and some people who weee listening no doubt were put off by what he said. What follows is the first in a series of four reflections on Jesus’s teaching about the cost of discipleship.

Then he said to the crowd, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but are yourself lost or destroyed? If anyone is ashamed of me and my message, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he returns in his glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels. I tell you the truth, some standing here right now will not die before they see the Kingdom of God

Luke 9:23-27 NLT

These words were spoken to “the crowd.” But just before he said them Jesus was speaking to his disciples. “The Son of Man must suffer many terrible things… He will be rejected… he will be killed, but on the third day he will be raised from the dead,” he had said. When he turned to the crowd and said what he said, they must have been somewhat mystified, because they hadn’t heard what he said about being rejected and killed. The disciples, on the other hand, must have been alarmed because he had indicated both the way in which he was to die – on a cross, the standard form of Roman execution at the time – and a suggestion that following him meant a willingness to go though exactly the same thing. But there is every possibility that they missed his whole point at the time, and it only made sense years later when they were relating these words to Luke, and thinking back on all that had happened since.

That’s what taking up your cross daily means – being willing to be crucified – executed, put to death, die – for Jesus’s sake. Not exactly a great recruiting message. Not exactly something that comes naturally to any of us. We hold on to life fiercely. Everything in us resists dying. The survival instinct is strong in every one of us. But here Jesus is saying that if we want to be his followers we have to adopt a completely different mindset – that of giving up our life.

However, the Christianity that Jesus calls us to is not some kind of death cult, not at all. What I think he is saying is that our commitment to him must be a stronger force in us than our instinct to hang onto life. He suggests, very insightfully, that there will be times when our instinct for life will push us to deny Christ. It is at those times that we must, if we want to be his followers, go against instinct and acknowledge him, regardless of the consequences. Our desire to promote Jesus and follow him must become greater than our desire to hold onto life.

The reality is, we all die. Some die young, most die old. The medical profession is committed to putting off that reality as long as possible. But the medical profession does not have an answer to the purpose of the life we have, whether it is short or long. That is left for us to work out ourselves. For many, it would seem the purpose of the life we have been given is to gain as much stuff as possible in order to live in the greatest possible comfort and security before we die. Jesus calls this “gaining the whole world,” but says there is no point to it if we lose ourselves in the process. Jesus would say that the purpose of life is to find ourselves, but that we can only truly find ourselves if we first acknowledge Jesus, and then accept the invitation to be his disciples. That is the ultimate purpose of life. If we achieve that, then when (and how) we die is irrelevant, we have found life, a life that will never end.