Great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and addressed them, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14.25-27)
During World War II, army recruits were sent to one of several military training facilities in the country to prepare them for combat, such as Camp Roberts in California or Camp Hood in Texas. Infantrymen were instructed in the use of rifles, machine guns, grenades and other instruments of war. The period of time for bootcamp could range from eight to thirteen weeks, after which the recruit was shipped overseas to become part of a regiment.
However, in spite of their training, many–if not most–were ill prepared for what lay ahead. The reality of war was not close to the make-believe of war in training camps. The army learned soon that recruits on the front line hesitated to shoot their guns at the enemy, the reality of killing another person too much for their psyches. So, training camps had to implement the use of human effigies–lookalikes–in their programs, immunizing, in effect, soldiers to the sight of shooting another person.
And the camps in California and in Texas seemed like country clubs once the soldiers were in the frontlines, whether in France or in the Pacific. The winter months were severe–like Siberia–and neither the clothing on their backs nor the camps back home had conditioned the infantrymen for that fact. In the Pacific Theater, they were particularly ill-prepared, untrained for jungle warfare, for the smothering heat, for the continuous rain that turned everything into mud.
In short, they weren’t ready, not really, for the task that they were expected to do, not on the Western Front, not in the Pacific, not in the trenches of real war. And while many survived, many did not; and those who did, came home with both physical and psychological wounds that remained with them for the rest of their lives.
So, if what Rabbi Jesus says to his would-be disciples in the passage we have heard today sounds harsh–and it does–it is for good cause. He wants his recruits to understand the hard battle that they will be fighting in the world and he makes clear the high cost that they will have to pay if they follow him. He pulls no punches, but presents the unvarnished truth to them.
He asks them, “What king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms.” In other words, preparedness is key to success. Or, said another way, disciples have to be clear-eyed about their commitment to his cause.
For Luke the evangelist, everything in his gospel is understood through the lens of Rabbi Jesus going to Jerusalem. It is always in the background until it is in the foreground. Once Luke states that Rabbi Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem (9.51), not only are his steps directed towards the city, but also his words. The context is always Jerusalem, where Rabbi Jesus knows in his heart that suffering and death, humiliation and crucifixion await him.
He wants those with him to understand that they are not on their way to a picnic with paper plates and plastic cups. Instead, they are entering a war zone and, like every other place where wars are fought, there will be blood and gore, pain and despair. And in Jerusalem, they will be put to the test as never before, their commitment challenged to the breaking point.
So, it is not an understatement for the Rabbi to say to them, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” That is what he sees on the horizon for himself; and, if they are to be worthy of carrying his name on their breastplate, then they will have to carry a cross of the same size and of the same weight, if not in Jerusalem, then wherever the battle between good and evil takes them.
It is no small detail that Luke tells us at this point in the slog towards Jerusalem that “great crowds were traveling with Jesus.” In a short while, the Rabbi will find few, if any, at his side. Peter and the others have abandoned him, a stranger is conscripted to help him carry his cross, and “the great crowds” are nowhere to be seen as he dies between two hitmen, one repentant of his crimes, the other unrepentant to the end.
What accounts for the sudden disappearance of the great crowds? They walked with him when they believed he was going to Jerusalem to be crowned a king. But when they saw soldiers put a crown of thorns on his head, blood pouring down his scalp, they jumped ship, the reality of the fight more than they could take, gutless and spineless when the reality of war hit them in the face.
Apparently, they had not heard him or believed him when he had told them to “calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion.” Now, in the moment, they find themselves unprepared and unwilling to pay the price, skulking away, hiding in the shadows, spying on the gruesome scene from a safe distance. Through a terrible miscalculation, they thought their safety wasn’t at stake, until it was, at which point they ducked for cover.
For us, on this side of the crucifixion, it is still the same. The same caveat, the same calculation, the same call for commitment. We are in that “great crowd” traveling with Rabbi Jesus outside Jerusalem, a more or less comfortable place, our picnic baskets in hand. But will we be with him when we are within the walls of Jerusalem, when we are asked to choose a side, not as spectators at a stadium, but as soldiers on the frontline?
Whose side are we on–when the poor are castigated as lazy bums, when the hungry are called freeloaders, or when the marginalized are bullied? We have to pick a side, just as Rabbi Jesus did, and if we choose the same side he did, then we are in for the fight of our lives. In a world where the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner–Biblical shorthand for those who are oppressed by society–are stepped on and stepped over, we have to choose sides: either we stand with and for them, or we step away and apart from them. But, be sure, if we stand with them, we will hear about it.
Clarence Jordan, instrumental in the founding of Habitat for Humanity, among other efforts of his, once said, “One wonders why Christians today get off so easily. Is it because unchristian Americans are that much better than unchristian Romans, or is our light so dim that the tormentor can’t see it?” He asked, “What are the things we do that are worth persecuting?”
He’s asking the hard questions. And he’s right to ask them. If our discipleship is costing us nothing–no discomfort, no sleepless nights, no pinch in the pocketbook–then it’s a fair question to ask just who are we following. If we were put in a lineup with others from our neighborhood, would we be picked out as a disciple of the one who fed the hungry, healed the sick, ate with the sinner, and died on a cross because he associated with the wrong people?
The crux of the matter is that Rabbi Jesus said to pick up our cross and follow him. He did not say pick up our backpack and follow him. So, we should be clear. It is not easy to be his followers. Choosing to be his disciple puts us on a battleground, not on a playground, although many of us want to believe we can play at our work, and work at our play.
And the greatest battle we will fight, in all honesty, is not against forces outside ourselves, visible and in clear range. No, the biggest battle before us is inside ourselves, in our twisted hearts where good and evil are at continual war, the balance of power too often in question as we find it easier to just go along instead of standing against. We’re good at making compromises with our lower inclinations, feeding the beast as if it were a kitten, not a ravenous tiger, allowing it more and more living space in our heart until we find our better self is sleeping on the sofa.
In fact, we really can’t battle the enemy in the world until we’ve confronted and overthrown the enemy in our heart. Once that enemy is subdued, then we can take up arms against evil institutions, evil structures, and evil societies, all of which pit the powerful against the powerless, imprison the poor behind bars of prejudice and inopportuneness, and propagate programs that prohibit full participation in the goods of the earth by all in the world. Defeat our own selfishness and self-interests and we have met the greatest foe.
The writer Philip Yancey once made the same point when he wrote, “Inspection stickers used to have printed on the back ‘Drive carefully–the life you save may be your own.’ This is the wisdom of man in a nutshell. What God says, on the other hand, is ‘The life you save is the life you lose.’ In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself; and only a life given away for love’s sake is worth living.”
He continues, “To bring his point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of man’s wisdom, he was a perfect fool, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of himself is laboring under, not a cross, but a delusion.”
Yancy is simply stating the obvious–at least to the one who listens to what Rabbi Jesus tells us today. As he sees the skyline of Jerusalem in the distance, he sees where his road ends. Looking around, he forwarns his followers that the road forward is not an easy one. And, as we also will see, by the time he has lifted his cross upon his shoulders, most of the crowd has dwindled to a few stranglers, the rest having taken an exit ramp a few stops earlier.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 