Thomas J Parlette
“A High Price”
Luke 14: 25-33
9/4/22
One of the most important, but overlooked characters in the Gospel of Luke is the crowd. Starting in Chapter 4, more and more people began flocking to Jesus as he healed the sick and preached in the local synagogues. He was very popular at first. The crowds couldn’t wait to see what he would do next. They saw Jesus heal people who were paralyzed or had withered limbs. They saw him raise two people from the dead, chase away demonic spirits and even feed 5,000 people.
But then after the Transfiguration, Jesus begins to teach some hard lessons to the crowds traveling with him. Scholars call this section of Luke’s gospel the “travel narrative” – because everything for the next few chapters happens while Jesus is traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem.
Our passage for today is right in the middle of Jesus’ road trip. Verse 25 tells us that large crowds were traveling with Jesus, when Jesus stopped abruptly and delivered some pretty harsh words
“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.”
This is another one of those times that Jesus’ words make us stop and say “Wait – did I hear that right. That can’t be. Jesus is telling us we have to hate our loved ones? I thought Jesus was all about family values? What’s he talking about?
We get a lot of these hard sayings during this travel narrative section of Luke. This impromptu speech while on a road trip is meant to underscore the cost of discipleship – and it’s a high price indeed.
Jesus uses two quick stories to illustrate the need to count the cost before you set out on the path of discipleship. If you are going to follow me – count the cost, are you prepared to go all in, because that’s what it takes.
First, there’s the story about the man building a tower. Don’t you sit down and estimate the total cost first? Otherwise, you might run out of money before it’s done – and everyone will ridicule you for not counting the cost ahead of time.
On a hillside above the picturesque seaside town of Oban, Scotland, sits a brooding, gray granite structure known as McCaig’s Tower. It also has an alternate name – McCaig’s Folly. Passengers waiting to board the ferry to the sacred Isle of Iona can look back over their shoulders and see this circular stone wall looming over them. It vaguely resembles the ancient Colosseum, but through it’s gaping windows you can see nothing but sky. It’s nothing but a shell.
This massive stone monument was never finished. John Stuart McCaig, a wealthy banker was the man who conceived the project. You do have to say this on Old man McCaig’s behalf – he did count the cost before the first stone was laid. The tower was supposed to cost 5,000 pounds sterling. Taking inflation and currency-exchange rates into account, that’s nearly 1$ million on today’s money.
Work began in 1897 and continued until 1902, when McCaig died of a heart attack. Part of his purpose had been to give off-season work to local stonemasons. The project surely fulfilled that purpose for as long as it lasted. But – even though McCaig had made provision in his will for the tower to be completed – his heirs didn’t like the project. They saw it as a costly waste of money that would hang as an albatross around their necks for years to come with all the maintenance and upkeep.
So they went to court and successfully challenged the old man’s will. Work ground to a halt, and to this day, McCaig’s Folly stands as a monument to a dream never realized.
Mr. McCaig had grand visions for his tower. Conceived as a lasting monument to his family, it was to include a museum and art gallery; a real showplace for the little town of Oban. A central tower would display heroic statues of McCaig himself, his siblings and their parents.
But that’s not how people remember it today. They don’t remember the dream – only the disappointing reality. When tourists ask what’s that up on the hillside, the locals gesture at the gaping windows and lack of a roof. They sigh, and reply, “That’s McCaig’s Folly.”(1)
You always have to count the cost – and not just the money, but the desire and support from your heirs as well. Don’t let that happen to you, says Jesus.
Then Jesus tells the story of a King going out to wage war against another King. The first thing to do is consider how many soldiers you have. And if the other King has twice as many, well, the smart thing to do is negotiate a peace treaty instead of losing the battle. In each of these illustrations, discipleship is compared to a different task that is better left undone than attempted and failed. Thus Jesus makes it clear that following him is not a recommended option for the faint of heart.
Commenting on this passage in his book “Luke for Everyone”, N.T. Wright poses the hypothetical situation of a politician making a stump speech. This hopeful office-seeker calls to the crowd, “Vote for me, and you’ll lose your homes and families. You’ll be voting for higher taxes and lower wages. You’ll give up everything for me.”
How does that sound to you? Not very good. How would that candidate get even a single vote?
But try changing the scenario, Wright says. What if the speaker is not a politician drumming up votes, but the leader of a mountain climbing expedition asking for volunteers? The task before this team of climbers is a risky trek to an isolated village, bringing food to the starving inhabitants. “The dangers are real,” warns the leader. “We may not make it back alive. But people are starving, so somebody has to do it. So, who’s with me?”
Wright says it pays to read harsh-sounding words of Jesus more like the second scenario. Jesus isn’t looking for fans here. He’s recruiting disciples to do important and necessary work. There’s a huge difference.(2)
As Amy-Jill Levine says in her book “The Difficult Words of Jesus” – “To understand the Gospel – indeed to follow Jesus – should not be a continuing effort of making the teachings less demanding. Jesus never said being a disciple would be easy; to the contrary. But he did assure his followers that being a disciple would be worth their while.”(3)
To wrap up his impromptu lecture on the cost of discipleship, Jesus utters perhaps the hardest words of the passage:
“So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
A high price indeed. But the cost of discipleship is…. Everything. Giving up our attachment to everything.
As the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once put it:
“It is well known that Christ consistently used the expression “follower.” He never asks for admirers, worshippers, or even adherents. No – he calls disciples. It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for…”
“Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it. At the same time – as is implied in his saving work- he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower.”
“What then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower strives to be what he (or she, or they) admires. An admirer, however, keeps themselves personally detached. They fail to see that what is admired involves a claim on their life, and thus they fail to be or strive to be what they admire.”
“If you have any knowledge at all of human nature, who can doubt that Judas was an admirer of Christ! And we know that Christ at the beginning of his ministry had many admirers. Judas was precisely such an admirer and thus later became a traitor…”
“The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. They always play it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, they are inexhaustible about how highly they prize Christ, they renounce nothing, will not reconstruct their life, and will not let their life express what it is they supposedly admire. Not so for the follower. The follower aspires with all their strength to be what they admire.”(4)
Does discipleship come at a high price? Yes.
As T.S. Eliot once said about our spiritual journey it is “a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything).”(5)
But Jesus assures us that the high price will be worth it in the end.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Retrieved from homileticsonline.com, Aug. 2022.
2. Ibid…
3. Amy-Jill Levine, The Difficult Words of Jesus Abingdon Press, 2021, p35, 42, 43.
4. Retrieved from homileticsonline.com, Aug. 2022.
5. Ibid…
