Luke 14d

So after the foray into the Purpose Driven Church, now it's time to get back into the Word of God. And hopefully the change will have done me good; my blogs were starting to get pretty conventional!

Anyways . . .

Christians are often fairly limp-wristed in their approach to people they want to reach. I wonder if sometimes we give people the wrong idea of who God is. I mean, we see Him as the great and mighty master of Everything. Yet we seem to be leaving people thinking that God desperately wants you on his side, and that He'll be REALLY SAD if you don't come along . . .

Well, that's certainly not the approach Jesus takes in this chapter. He's willing to lay it all on the line for people. Everyone is welcome with Him - but on HIS terms. And he's not going to leave you to die wondering.

In context here, Jesus is dealing with a big crowd following him. We need to realise here that Jesus was COOL. He was the flavour of the month! Everyone who was anyone was dashing out to the countryside to hear this rebellious rabbi speak. So really, Jesus needed to ensure that anyone who chose to follow Him was doing so out of right motives.

So at a time when many of us might tell the crowd what they wanted to hear to secure their allegiance, Jesus was telling them the plain and simple (and unpleasant) truth.

Firstly He says that you need to be prepared to let go of family - Father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, sisters - and shoulder the cross, and follow.

Because these words are familiar, and because our culture is so different, it can be easy to lose sight of the horror these words would engender. Remember, in Jesus' culture, family is everything. When He says to let go of them, He's really saying to a person to let go of everything that gives their life meaning, that gives them identity. Effectively He's demanding that a person take on a new identity!

The Early Christians could see that - when someone became a Christian, they were granted a new name from the community! I think sometimes we are so much a part of the Christian ethos that we lose sight of how radical Christ's demands were.

More is to come, however. Jesus uses the phrase "shoulder the cross" (Message version - to many people it may be more familiar as "Take up your cross"). This is not only a forshadowing of Jesus' death, it's an expression directly referencing an extremely unpleasant form of execution. It would possibly have been seen as being in profoundly bad taste - imagine how you might react if someone said "You really need to sit on the electric chair".

Talk about talking tough . . .

Jesus then underlines it with using the metaphor of "counting the cost". He compares the person choosing whether or not to follow him with a king considering war with a larger army. Similarly, he proposes the image of a builder planning a house. Basically He's saying "Finish what you start, or don't start."

I have often wondered why the Salt metaphor is where it is, but it makes sense here - Jesus is saying that He wants people who will spice up the world. Anyone who's not prepared to count the cost will be no more than a bland flavour.