Hate your family?

 

Luke 14:25-33

A German theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship. In that book he says, 

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

What Bonhoeffer is saying is that we can interpret God’s love for us in such a way that nothing is expected of us. We can be like a spoiled child whose parents always clean up their mess and the child is never expected to help or even to apologize for making the mess. The child is never expected to participate in the chores of the family. The child isn’t even expected to treat the other family members with kindness or respect. It is a life where everything good is given to the child and there are no consequences for bad behavior, or expectations that they will participate in the chores of the family. … Any expectations placed on the child are interpreted as being not loving or not gracious.

This is a way of thinking about love and grace that is very short-sighted. What will a child who grows up like that become? … Would you want to be friends with someone who was shaped by that kind of childhood? Would you want to be married to someone who grew up that way? … While treating a child like this might seem loving and gracious in the short-term, in the long term it is not loving or kind. It shows a disregard for the person they will become. It will leave them unable to have healthy relationships. It will leave them unable to care for themselves. It will become very difficult to learn skills that require discipline. Their health might even suffer if they have never had to discipline their eating and are able to follow every desire of their body. We would expect a child who grew up that way to become a selfish person. Cheap grace is the way of the spoiled and selfish child.

Cheap grace is a way of thinking about love that has no expectations. You can ignore all the directions Christ has given you. You can follow every desire of your body. You can live however you want, and still receive everything from God that you want. This is cheap grace.

Cheap grace is not the grace that Christ is offering us. God cares about what kind of a person we become and so his love comes with expectations.

To make his point memorable and to make people think, Jesus often spoke with hyperbole. He exaggerated as a teaching technique. He tells us to cut off our hand or gouge out our eye if it causes us to sin. He doesn’t expect us to take that literally. … in our Gospel reading we have a similar kind of hyperbole.

Jesus says, 

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-27).

We are always in danger if we try to read a passage like this on its own apart from the rest of Scripture. In the 39 Articles of Religion. Article 20 on the Authority of the Church says that we should not “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” We need to read Scripture as a whole, and when we do that we will see that Jesus is using a teaching technique to get our attention. How can he mean for us to literally hate our mother and father when he tells us to love our neighbours (Luke 10:27) and even love our enemies (Luke 6:27-29)? In 1 Timothy 5:8, we read 

“whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” (See also- 1 Cor 7:12-13; 1 Pet 3:1-2).

 … So what is Jesus trying to say here?

Jesus wants us to have our priorities in correct order. He doesn’t want us to hate our family. Jesus was more full of love than any other human being that ever lived. Jesus also placed his love for his Father first. … I notice that I am at my best when I place my love for God first, then I find that I love my family more deeply and sacrificially. When I place God first then it is as if God’s love flows through me. I have more love when I focus, first of all, on God.

This is a hard lesson to hear. It is purposely shocking because Jesus wants us to think about the fact that there is a cost to following him. He wants us to offer him everything. He wants us to offer our whole life to be marinated in the ways of God. He doesn’t want us to just have a few Sunday morning sprinkles that rest on top of our life. He wants the ways of God to soak deeply into every area of our lives. When we offer him everything then he will make it eternal and offer it back to us.

We sometimes focus on the eternal blessings he offers us without speaking about what we are called to offer him. There is a cost. Jesus asks us to consider that cost. He says we shouldn’t even begin if we aren’t ready to pay the price.

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish’" (Luke 14:28-30).

He’s saying it’s better to not begin than to begin and not follow through. If we aren’t willing to pay the price, then we shouldn’t start. Following Jesus is more like a marinade, than a spice that rests on top. … Just to make it really clear Jesus says, 

“those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples” (Luke 14:33).

 It doesn’t get much clearer than that. He is inviting us to place our entire life into his care. We are to bring all of our life under his authority.

This is an incredible demand, but we should also realize that there is a cost to not being his disciple (as Dallas Willard has said). The cost to not being his disciple is a life offered to the systems of this world rather than to God. The world will not offer our lives back to us blessed with an infilling of heaven. The systems of this world will consume our lives and use them up until there is nothing left of them.

We have to offer our lives to something. We don’t have the choice to not offer it. We can offer it to our own selfish appetites- To money- to some ideology or “ism”. We are created to offer our lives, and so we will. But whatever we offer our lives to will shape us- it will enliven us or destroy us.

Bonhoeffer wrote, 

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

 We die to the broken systems of the world. We offer ourselves to God so that our lives will have the correct priorities, and we can live a life that is about restoring us back to the way we were meant to be.

When we consider what Christ is asking of us, we sometimes get into questions of grace. Grace is what God offers us freely. Grace cannot be earned. Nothing we do can force God to save us. Nothing we can do can force God to do anything for us. God doesn’t owe us anything. Our existence is an incredible gift that we can never repay God for.

So how does grace work with Jesus’ call to us to carry our cross and offer him everything? How can he demand everything, and give freely? Bonhoeffer calls this “costly grace”. Bonhoeffer says, 

“Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: 'Ye were bought at a price', and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”

What Christ offers us is a particular kind of life. That particular kind of life is the grace he offers us. To not enter into that life by offering our lives up to his teachings and Lordship is to not accept his offer of grace. To choose to not live the life he is teaching us, is to not accept the grace he is offering us. He is offering us a life filled with his Spirit. To deny the life he offers is to deny the grace he offers. Bonhoeffer said it this way, 

“The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.”

These are hard teachings, but we do ourselves no favors by ignoring them. Yes, they are demanding and uncomfortable, but they are also rewarding. The cross ends with resurrection. If he demands much, he offers infinitely more. So let us strive, not to earn, but to live the life he is so graciously offering us.

AMEN