Hating the Jesus Way

Luke 14:25-33
Jesus is walking through the countryside from place to place teaching, and preaching where ever he goes. As he walks people begin to follow him. At first there is just a handful of stragglers furtively following him, and then a couple dozen, but soon there are crowds of hangers-on following him where ever he goes. Jesus must feel like a rock star who can’t step foot out of his trailer without a sea of people greeting him or turning around with out a loud cheer erupting from a crowd of near swooning people just hoping to catch a glimpse of the new famous teacher who just might heal you with a word or a touch of his robe. So here Jesus is walking along with this unwieldy crowd of people following in his wake. You can almost see him stop take a deep calming breath and attempt to continue on his way, but where ever he goes, what ever he does, they are there. He gets up in the morning, they are there. He brushes his teeth, they are there. They watch him eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. He tries to get alone, to pray and they are there. It seems they will not be hindered no matter how fast, no matter how far, or no matter where he walks they are right there, just like a large, loud 3-demensional shadow. It seems there is nothing he can do to shake them. Even the son of God is getting a little impatient with this kind of following. So he stops and he turns to them. And he tells them that it is “O.K.” if they want to follow him. He won’t stop them but they need to understand what it means to follow him. They are more than welcome to become his followers but he going to be sure they completely understand exactly what it will cost them should they choose to continue in this reckless behavior.

In order to follow Jesus they must first understand that they need to hate their father, mother, spouse, children, brothers and sisters. If you are not willing to hate all theses people and even your own life, well then you might as well turn around and go home. In my imagination the entire crowd gave a sigh of exacerbation at this point, Jesus is taking it a little far this time. Sure his teachings have been a little controversial but he has never said anything like this before. You must hate your family in order to follow him. Seriously? Come on!
I have to say as a preacher passages like this are just a mite bit frustrating to run across. This goes against everything I have ever learned about Jesus and it kind of wrecks something I have worked really hard to teach you all this past summer. I have spent quite a bit of time laying out the foundational nature of the greatest commandment, that it that everything who we are as Christians is summed up in Jesus’ call for us to love God and to love to love each other, and then Jesus has to go off and say that in order to follow him we must all hate all the members of our families and then just to be sure we got it, he has to go off and list them all, every last one of them.
Of course though, Jesus is not really calling for us to hate the members of our family. Jesus is using a little bit of hyperbole to make his point here. Jesus does not call for us to hate anybody, not in the way we would think about it anyways. Jesus is calling for these people to not blindly and undiscerningly follow him, Jesus wants them to truly understand what it costs to give up everything and follow him.
Not to long ago I explained to you that the primary unit of first century society was the family. Family was supposed to be the most important thing in your life. You were not to ever do anything to go against your family. Even as an adult it was considered not merely rude but delinquent of you to openly and publicly disagree with your parents much less leave them and what they stood for to follow some new teacher who claimed to be the Messiah.
Jesus says that choosing to become one of his followers is not something to be taken lightly. It is not an endeavor we should do on a whim so to speak. He wants us to know and understand the cost of discipleship. A builder carefully examines the projected costs of building a building before he sets out to build a building. A king examines what his armies are capable of doing before he sets out to war. Otherwise they will get halfway through and the cost will be even greater than had they not set out at all. Likewise, if you are going to follow Jesus you need to be completely aware of the endeavor on which you are about to embark.
We all know that God’s forgiveness and God’s grace is free, but that does not mean that nothing is asked of us when we choose to follow God. As preacher’s we like to emphasize the free nature of the gifts which God gives to us but although the gifts are free the cost of discipleship is most definitely not free. Giving up our lives, giving up what we want to do, how we want to act, speaking the words we want to speak, for doing, acting and speaking in the ways God chooses for us is quite costly. There is nothing which is harder to give up, nothing which is harder to let go of than the control we have over ourselves. In fact it is so hard to give up that even when we say we want to let go and allow God to be in control we often find that we have retaken that control back from God and have to let go all over again.
Jesus at this point is turning to crowds who have decided to wholesale follow him but do not truly understand what exactly they are giving up when they are choosing to follow him. They think they are going for a stroll, listening to the new preacher in town, going with the crowd, doing something new and exciting but what they are buying into is a new way of life, a new way of ordering everything we do, a whole new way of looking at the world.
When we choose to follow Jesus, we are choosing Jesus above all else. We are choosing Gods ways over our ways. We are choosing the hard path over the smooth one. We are choosing a culture of total abandonment to all that come naturally to us and instead choosing a culture of being renewed, reformed, transformed and remade to be people we can not and will not ever be on our own, but we are choosing to be better than we are, truer than we are. By choosing to follow Jesus we are giving up who we are and life as we know it, so we can become who we were created to be, and enter into life as it is meant to be lived.
Everything in this world is around us is broken beyond recognition. The lives we live, the choices which come naturally to us, the way we are accustomed to living, moving, acting and speaking are fallen, bent, broken ways to be in this world. Sin has twisted who are. Evil has bent and broken all creation beyond all semblance of what it should have been. When we choose Christ we are giving up life as we know it and exchanging it for life as God knows it can be. We have only known life, broken. We have only known ourselves stained, twisted and tarnished. Life this way is wrong. It is incorrect, but it feels right because it is all we have ever known. The cost of discipleship is giving it all up, all we own all we know, all of who we are, giving it to God so we can become who we could be, who we can be, who we were created to be. When we follow Jesus we give up seeing the world the way it is so we can catch glimpses of God’s kingdom come, what the world would be like if the created order was restored; what life could be if it was the way God desires for it to be. We get to give up life broken, and experience life transformed. We get to begin to see the world in the same way, broken waiting to be remade by the one who crafted it in the first place.
As amazing as this sounds it is not easy. Giving up who we are, our very life, to God is big stuff. It is scary stuff. It means going against everything and perhaps everybody in your life. It means denying what the world around us tells us is good and exchanging that broken idea of good for what is truly good.
Jesus may be exaggerating a little bit when he tells those following him around that they must hate their family members and even their own lives in order to truly follow him, but he is not exaggerating all that much. Jesus was literally asking them to decide could they turn from their families to follow him, would they be willing to give up life as they knew it and go where he called them to go, do what he called them to do, no matter who they had to leave behind or what that meant for their own safety, security or sense of self?
In Jesus’ day following Jesus could really mean leaving your family or having your family leave you? Truly following Jesus and what he stood for would eventually mean choosing the truth of the gospel, the truth of Jesus over your familial commitments. Following Jesus when your parents called for you not to was not merely about going against your father and mother’s wishes, it was not merely about creating tension in the family unit, but it meant going against a time honored societal norm, being labeled as a rebellious child, a delinquent, and a societal menus. Following Jesus was not about pleasing your parents. It was not about pleasing your family. It was about pleasing God and Jesus wanted them to know that pleasing God might just put them at odds with the most basic understandings of their culture and put them at odds with those whom they cared about the most. Following Jesus would mean giving up life as they knew it.
You can not be too attached to the life you have, because God is not about upholding the status quo. God is not about propping up that which makes us feel good and causes us to feel comfy and cozy, God is about radically transforming us, changing us, reforming us into the people we would be, we could be, if sin had not bent and twisted us beyond recognition. And sometimes that means that we have to choose God over and above things which are important to us. Sometimes that means we have to choose God over and above things which our society tells us should be important to us. Sometimes that means giving up everything we have ever known to be true and realize it is false and be willing to learn a new truth and a completely new, radically different way to look at the world. We have to be willing to give everything up, our families, our loved ones, the things we hold most dear to us, even the lives which we have so carefully built and put together, in order to live life the way God is calling for us to live it. We have to be willing to put our belief in Jesus Christ and living the kind of life he calls for us to live over and above all things.

Jesus sees us here this morning. He knows we want to follow him. Arriving at church this morning, choosing to be here over and above the many other places we could choose to be doing this morning says something about the choices we have already begun to make. And as we are here in this sanctuary this morning Jesus is turning to us this morning and saying, “Following me is serious stuff.” This is live changing, life altering. You need to know what you are getting into. You need to be ready to pay the price it might cost. You need to know what you might be giving up if you continue down the path you are walking. It means choosing God’s ways over and above the ways of the world around you. It means that many times people in the world around you will tell you, you are wrong, that you are choosing something that is crazy, something which is not good, and something which is causing you to break up the things which our culture holds dear. Choosing God and choosing to follow Jesus could mean going against those you are closest to. It means giving up everything you thought was good and right. It means giving up what you believe to be the right way to go, the right way to live and instead going and living in the ways God is calling you to live. I am not saying that God’s way is not better. I am not saying God’s way is not good. I am not even saying that God’s way is not the way we are meant to live, because God’s way is better, it is right and living God’s way means living the was were created to live, but it might not feel better at first. I may not fee good and it will feel as if it goes against your very nature. It means giving up control.
It means allowing God to reshape, remake and re-create you back into who God created you to be. It means giving up your life, as you are living it now, giving up life as you know it so that you can live life God’s way.
The cost of discipleship is great. We are all here this morning following Jesus, and Jesus is telling us what it means and he is going to turn back around and go on his way and we have to decide whether or not we are going to choose to continue to follow him or to stop, turn around and make our ways back home. What will you do this morning?