September 7, 2025
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Luke 14:25-33
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us the cost of discipleship—and these costs are very high. Perhaps we should have waited to welcome new members until next week, when the Gospel revolves around lost sheep and lost coins. That would be a more welcoming Gospel for a Sunday that celebrates new members.
It’s also a curious Gospel for God’s Work, Our Hands Sunday. Our lectionary is much older, of course, than our various approaches to God’s Work, Our Hands across the Lutheran church.
It’s a much more negative sounding Gospel than we may be used to: we have to hate our loved ones, we have to pick up a cross which in the first century would lead to a literal crucifixion, and we have to give up our possessions. Yikes. Who would sign up for this?
Let’s ask the question that Christians have been asking for centuries. Was Jesus meaning us to take this passage literally? Different Christians have come to different conclusions.
It’s important to remember that for the first three centuries of Christianity, professing allegiance to Jesus would put you squarely against the larger culture, especially once it became clear that Christianity was a new religion, not a newer expression of Judaism. Being a professing Christian meant that many avenues of wealth would be closed to one, and that family members would be the ones doing the rejecting. Many Christians were killed by the Roman empire. It is amazing that the religion survived at all, so fierce was the Roman response to it.
But what does it mean for us today? Was Jesus giving future Christians this advice? Are we meant to take it literally? Some Christians would tell us that yes, Jesus meant it literally. If we deny ourselves the pleasures of this life—loved ones, riches, life itself—we get eternal life. Some Christians would tell us that it’s a great bargain—forty to sixty years of deprivation on this side of death, but an eternity to enjoy whatever pleasures paradise will bring.
Scholars of ancient rhetoric have looked at this passage as one of hyperbole, exaggeration used for some other purpose, which was a common technique in ancient texts—and indeed, even today. Perhaps in this passage, Jesus tries to shock his followers out of their complacency.
Maybe he’s not talking to the committed few who have already given up so much to follow him and earlier martyrs like John the Baptist, but to the crowds whom he can’t seem to shake. Maybe he wants to be sure of who is really interested in true discipleship and who is following him hoping for a miracle; in the Gospel of John, he would already know and in the Gospel of Mark, he would never be sure. But we’re in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus gives people outside of his disciples extra chances to declare their allegiance in a way that he doesn’t in the other three Gospels.
Maybe he’s telling the people who think he’s nothing but free meals and miracle healings that there’s more involved. Is it a warning or is it a promise?
But perhaps, we’ve lost some of the nuance of the original words of Jesus. Maybe what he’s saying isn’t as horrible as it sounds at first. Maybe the concepts of the Greek words don’t translate as easily to English. For example, look at the verb that might trouble us most: hate. But some Biblical scholars say that Jesus wasn’t telling us to hate our loved ones, but to show non-preferential treatment. This idea would have been as appalling to first century followers. We’re supposed to treat our sister the same way we would a stranger? Jesus says yes.
But before we breathe a sigh of relief, let us make no mistake. Jesus is talking about the nature of sacrifice, and for some of us, the sacrifice will be steep. Jesus wasn’t talking about the cross we’ll have to pick up in the sense that we might mean it, as in “This difficult situation is just my cross to bear.” We know from past readings that Jesus calls us to choose God over Caesar, and we know from history that this choice often came with the harsh penalty of capital punishment. Even today, in parts of the world, following God may mean that we make the ultimate sacrifice, our literal lives. As 20th century martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Archbishop Oscar Romero would remind us, it only takes a change in government for Christians to become targets, and that change to an oppressive government may not be as impossible as we like to think.
The idea that we have to give up our possessions may seem like a much easier cost of discipleship. We might be tempted to bargain: “I’ll give up my possessions if I get to keep my life. In matters of justice and mercy, I’ll treat my loved ones just the way I treat everyone else—that’s a bargain I can try to live with.”
Here we see the danger of taking this passage too literally. We lose the larger message that Jesus preaches. Here, as in so many other parts of the Gospel, Jesus tells us that we should travel lightly in this world. In earlier translations, Jesus tells us to renounce our possessions, which can have a slightly different connotation. It might be even more accurate to say that Jesus tells us to separate ourselves from our possessions. Jesus understand the ways our possessions can own us. Over and over again, Jesus warns us of the heavy baggage that comes with having possessions.
At this point we might feel despair about our ability to walk this pilgrim path.
But as our spiritual ancestors tell us that this all gets easier the more we practice. If we think of all that we own as being on loan to us, it's easier to pass our stuff along, easier to help others who don’t have as much stuff. If we simplify our lives, it's easier not to clutch to our money as much. If we spend our time in prayer and spiritual reading, it's easier to rely on God. If we spend our time practicing inclusivity, it's easier to expand our idea of family. In this way, we bear the crosses of others, in that modern sense of the word. We lighten the yokes for us all.
Discipleship is a process. We are not born good or bad disciples. It’s a process that benefits from practice. Like the person who builds a house or the ruler who contemplates war, we have calculations to make. Jesus is warning the uninitiated, to be sure. But Jesus also asks us to calculate the cost of discipleship.
Jesus understands all the ways that the lives we are living can be a form of death. The cost of discipleship also comes with a promise of opportunities that we wouldn’t recognize otherwise. The cost of discipleship comes with an enormous gain—a life worth living, this life, not the one after we die. The discipline of discipleship transforms us into believers who are, in the words of our Psalm for today, “like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.”
If that’s the cost of discipleship, that we become like those trees, then it’s really a bargain when we do our calculations—a bargain AND an incredible gift.
