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Luke 9:57-62
The Cost of Following Jesus
57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
58 Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
59 He said to another man, “Follow me.”
But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”
60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”
62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
A lot of people who identify themselves as Christians seem to have the idea that the point of the Christian faith is to “get saved” – as though once you say “Jesus is my Lord and Savior,” your ticket is punched for heaven, and you get to spend the rest of your earthly life feeling holier than non-believers.
But the noted theologian Richard Mouw – who went to college with Fred and Mary Jane Thomas – says that ‘being saved’ isn’t just about what you’re saved from (like saved from your sins). He says it’s also about what you’re saved for. What Richard Mouw is getting at is that becoming a committed follower of Jesus carries with it a new way of life that can be hard.
That hard way of life is what our reading for today is all about.
This passage tells us about conversations Jesus had with three men about becoming his disciples. There are parts of the passage that make some readers uneasy and a couple of points for clarification, so let’s take care of the clarifications first and then think about the passage as a whole.
First of all, lots of readers hate the part where a guy says he needs to bury his father before becoming a disciple. Our first thought is that Jesus is insisting that the guy leave his poor dead father unburied. But some Bible scholars suggest that the man isn’t talking about a father on his death bed, but rather about putting off a life of discipleship for years into the future. They say it’s even possible the man’s motivation was financial – that if he stayed home until his father died, he would inherit the family’s wealth. If he left to follow Jesus now, they say, the father might make someone else the heir.
If we’re serious about following Jesus, we probably won’t experience a life of great wealth and material comfort. His life certainly wasn’t. Most of us (myself included) live very comfortably, compared to most of the people in this world. And the further we go along the path of discipleship, it seems to me, the more we should expect to have the Holy Spirit questioning our attachment to the things of this world and calling us to make sacrifices for the kingdom. That, it seems to me, is what Jesus is talking about in that part of the passage.
The second point of clarification concerns the man who wants to go home to say good-bye to his family. Jesus warns the man about ‘putting your hand to the plow and looking back.’ He’s referring to a basic principle of agriculture, which is that the only way to plow a straight furrow is to fix your eyes on a point at the far side of the field and plow straight toward it. If you start looking back to see how you’re doing, you’ll end up plowing a crooked furrow. Jesus might even have been quoting a saying from his time and just adding “in the kingdom of God” on the end of it.
It seems to me that the key phrase in the third exchange, the one about the plow, is “go back.” My sense is that Jesus is warning about any kind of ‘going back’ in the life of faith. Unless we keep our vision focused on Jesus and keep steering toward him, and especially if we keep ‘looking back’ to see how we’re doing, we risk ending up on a crooked path that gets us nowhere.
Jesus seems to be setting an impossibly high standard here. He seems to be saying that anyone who wants to be his disciple has to walk away from everything – including their family obligations. Can that possibly be the case? After all, in his letters the apostle Paul seems to be urging followers of Jesus to live as responsible citizens and family members. So how are we supposed to take this passage?
It seems to me that it’s not helpful to get caught up in the specifics of each of the men’s situations. That can just distract us from the real point Jesus is making, which is that we shouldn’t expect that following him is easy or without cost. It’s a way of life that calls faithful followers to make greater and greater sacrifices for the kingdom as we grow in our lives of faith and service.
Jesus probably isn’t expecting (or maybe even hoping) that all of us who read his words today will walk away from our responsibilities and become wandering evangelists. I tend to think instead that he’s warning all those who consider following him to expect that the path of discipleship is a demanding one. Sometimes a difficult one. Often one that includes real sacrifice.
Let’s pray. Lord, help us to hear your call to true discipleship, and to commit our hearts to making our relationship with you in Jesus the center of our lives in this world. Help us to live in obedience to his teachings and in imitation of his life of loving service to the lost and least around us. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
(The other readings for today are Psalms 1 and 2; Ezekiel 4:1-17; and Hebrews 6:1-12. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.com, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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