The Cost of Discipleship
“Now large crowds were traveling 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.’” (Luke 14:25–26)
Sermon — September 7, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
So, I have a confession to make to all of you: my family and I are still in denial that it’s September, and so we stole away out of town for another short weekend the last couple of days. And we had a lovely time; and that’s what I have to confess to you, my deficiency as a disciple in recent days. I do not, in fact, hate my family.
Maybe I shouldn’t make fun of what Jesus says. But you have to admit that today’s Gospel sounds more than a little absurd. Three easy steps to becoming a disciple: 1) hate your family; (Luke 14:26) 2) prepare yourself for execution; (14:27) and 3) give up all your possessions. (14:33)
How are we supposed to make sense of this?
How do we reconcile the Jesus who says that the Two Great Commandments are to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves; the Jesus who tells us to love another as he has loved us; with the Jesus who tells us that we cannot be his disciples unless we hate our families, even life itself. How do we reconcile our experience of spiritual growth, of the gradual and often-surprising ways in which our faith changes and develops over the course of our lives, with these all-or-nothing demands: not “be ready to endure some suffering” but “be ready to be put to death”; not “be a little more generous,” but “give up all your possessions.”
Well, the great Biblical scholar Origen of Alexandria, one of the most brilliant people in the early Church, often remarked that the most confusing or inconsistent parts of the literal text of the Bible are there to remind us that its true meaning is always found in the spiritual sense. So in the spirit of Origen, I’m going to lean into the contradictions today and try to see: What spiritual sense is wrapped within these confusing words?
Origen, by the way, was a talented scholar of Hebrew. And so Origen knew what you might not know, which is that the word “hate,” when used in the Bible, doesn’t always mean what we mean by hate. The Hebrew idiom of the Bible often pairs these two verbs, “love” and “hate,” when it actually wants to indicate a priority or a preference between two things that are really both loved. So for example, the ancient Israelite patriarch Jacob marries two sisters, Leah and then Rachel, but Laban their father tricks him into marrying Leah first, when he really wants to marry Rachel. So Genesis tells us, “he loved Rachel more than Leah,” and then in the next verse it says, so “when God saw that Leah was hated.” (Gen. 29:30–31) “Hated” here, is a relative term; one is the favorite, and one is second-favorite. Jesus seems to be using “hate” in this same kind of idiomatic way. And we know this because the Gospel of Matthew gives us another version of what Jesus said today, when Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matt. 14:26) Jesus isn’t saying that if you want to be a disciple, you have to be cruel or mean to anyone; it’s an idiomatic way of saying that the disciple’s love of God has to take priority over love of anyone else. I still struggle with this idea—for me, these different kinds of love don’t feel like they are ranked, one above the other. But I can at least understand the notion that a genuine commitment to the teachings of Jesus will sometimes bring us into conflict with the people who share our blood—and that was even more true in the early days of the church, when the new Christian’s parents and siblings often didn’t share that faith.
So there’s some important linguistic context here. But there’s also narrative context. In other words, this at a particular place in the story. Jesus is on the road, in this section of the Gospel of Luke, on his way from his home in Galilee down to Jerusalem. And Jesus knows what’s going to happen at the end of the story. He keeps predicting it, and the disciples keep ignoring or misunderstanding it. But Jesus is on his last journey to Jerusalem; he’s going to face betrayal, and abandonment, and death. But the people around him don’t seem to understand. He’s being followed by a “large crowd.” (Luke 14:25) They seem to think he’s going to seize the throne. And Jesus turns to them. This is not some kind of a parade. I’m not going to march into Jerusalem and take charge, and give cushy jobs to all of you. If you want to be my disciple—if you really want to follow me, he says, you’re going to have to do it with your cross on your back, because that’s where I’m headed.
They’re not quite ready for that. Between this moment and Good Friday, all of them will turn away. They’ll love their own lives more than him. They won’t choose to carry their cross and follow him to death. They won’t give up all their possessions—in fact, after Jesus dies, they go back home to fish, because they did not, in fact, sell off their boats and nets. Not one of these disciples can bear to pay the cost to bring the task to completion.
And what does God do then? If you didn’t know the rest of the story, you might think that God would apply the logic of the law: the cause-and-effect logic we saw in Deuteronomy and Psalm 1 today. “I have set before you… life and prosperity, death and adversity…” Choose life and you shall live. Turn away and you shall perish. (Deut. 30:15–17) Delight in the law of the Lord, and you’ll be like a tree planted by streams of water; linger in the way of sinners, and you’ll be like chaff that blows away. (Ps. 1)
But that’s not how God responds. Because God is not a God of vengeance or of punishment. The God of Christian faith is the God revealed in Jesus—who is hated, more than he could ever hate; who carries his cross alone, to be crucified between two bandits, not between his friends; who gives up everything that he has, to save the very people who have let him down.
The disciples fail him, and Jesus dies. And he rises again. And then he sends the Holy Spirit to give them the strength that they never had before to live up to his love. And after his death, they do what they never did during his life. They do sell what they have and share it with those who are in need. They are willing to follow Jesus even to their own deaths. Somehow, even though the Holy Spirit is so much less tangible than the Jesus they once knew, it reminds them of what he said and leads them to follow.
We’re at the beginning of a new year, at least as far as schools and churches are concerned. And I wonder: What will it look like for you to follow Jesus this year? Think about the most gentle rephrasing of what Jesus has to say. What would it look like to make your relationship with God a priority in your life? What kind of discomfort, or even suffering, are you willing to bear because of the things you believe? How much of what you possess are you able to give away?
All around the world, in ordinary parish churches like this, ordinary people are asking themselves these questions today. And the answer to the question, “Can I be a disciple in the radical way that Jesus is talking about?” is mostly, “No.” And yet—many of those ordinary people will do extraordinary things this year. They’ll start projects in the community that they never thought they could get off the ground. They’ll make it through things in their lives that they never thought they could endure. All around the world, we’ll count the cost of discipleship this year and find that we fall short and nevertheless, we’ll try to follow Jesus; and God will respond to our inadequate attempts not with punishment but with grace, and with a Holy Spirit that empowers us to grow more and more into the shape of Christ.
So, I wonder: what fruit will God’s love bear in your life, this year?
