1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word as we observe the 13th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Luke 14:25-35. Today, Jesus teaches us that our affections for personal pursuits or family members can replace the great compassion that He has for us. But, Jesus’ gracious words, life, death, and resurrection draw us away from our affections so we are filled with his compassion. The message is entitled, “The Cost of Discipleship,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. We may know of or have heard of people who have dedicated their lives to one pursuit— the Olympic athlete, the statesman, the young entrepreneur, the artist. These show man’s capability to narrow his focus to accomplish his goals. In the face of deteriorating family values today, people are vulnerable to putting family members first. But, how would Jesus handle such intense personal commitments and family commitments? In the Gospel from Luke 14 we see Jesus, full of grace and truth, daring enough to confront adults who had come to love intensely their family members. He does it by the use of a hyperbole. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father or mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).
3. In the Old Testament, God was refining his people’s devotion to him by calling into question their love for their family members. Long before Jesus came from heaven to live among us as a loving servant, God challenged Abraham, the man promised to be the father of many nations, to take his long-awaited son Isaac and sacrifice him. I’ve often wondered what Abraham thought as he and Isaac made their way up the very slopes to the mountain on which Jesus would someday be crucified. But the account in Genesis 22 is direct. “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” (Gen. 22:2)
4. I would anticipate at this point that there would be some questioning on Abraham’s part. But there isn’t. The next verse simply says, “Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey.” (Gen. 22:3) Abraham takes two servants and travels for three days, and when they reach the right place, Abraham says, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” (Gen. 22:5) What an odd form of worship Abraham had in mind that entailed the sacrifice of his son! But it’s the type of worship God and Jesus in the Gospel are looking for from us. He wants a worship of him that has stripped away all other “loves” we have, even the love we have for our children. C. S. Lewis says in his book “The Four Loves,” “it is not that we don’t love enough, it is that we love too much. C. S. Lewis’ English word for love of a family member is “affection”; his word for the love Jesus looks for from us is “charity” (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.] 167). In fact, this entire book could serve as a commentary on this passage from Luke 14. He cites St. Augustine (Confessions IV, 10) when Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him. Augustine says, “this is what comes of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for God, who will never pass away. He wants from us a worship of him that is single-minded in purpose, never loving anything or anyone above him, for the love of another, including family members, can destroy us.” As John Donne, the English poet and preacher prayed, “That our affections kill us not, nor Dye.” (Quoted by Lewis as a subtitle of this book (ibid.).
5. The story of Abraham attempting to sacrifice Isaac comes as a preparation for the challenge Jesus sets forth to the crowd that listened to him in the Gospel from Luke 14. Although Abraham did leave his idols (Joshua 24) and his idol-worshiping family members in the city of Ur when God called him to go to the Promised Land, he wasn’t without his moments of loving his own plan above God’s. Remember, he passed off his beautiful wife Sarah as his sister when he encountered the mighty Pharaoh of Egypt (Genesis 12). Remember how he took Hagar as his substitute wife when he and Sarah felt that God’s promise of a descendant wouldn’t be fulfilled. But now, after the promised son had come and after he’d been through many of life’s trials, Abraham responded to God’s testings in a mature, faith-filled manner. The text simply says, “Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey” (Gen 22:3). It’s the reason the Book of Romans states, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Rom 4:3).
6. During this season of Pentecost, Jesus raises the standards of discipleship. The word that catches our attention is the word hate. It’s difficult to use this word without evoking an emotional response. We can use the words dislike or unfavorably disposed, but hate is an emotionally charged word. It seems to be the opposite of some of Jesus’ other statements, “But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you: Bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. . . . If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? . . . But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back” (Lk 6:27). Again, C. S. Lewis is helpful, “But how are we to understand the word hate? That Love Himself should be commanding what we ordinarily mean by hatred—commanding us to cherish resentment, to gloat over another’s misery, to delight in injuring him—is almost a contradiction in terms. I think [what] our Lord [means is] to hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concessions to . . . the suggestions of the Devil.” (Ibid., 171).
7. The Greek word misei doesn’t soften the English. “Hate” is a pretty good translation. Enemies are enemies because, for whatever reason, a mood of hate exists between the two parties. We may say, “This will not preach,” especially in a day when the divorce rate is rising, when more and more family members live at a distance from each other, and many don’t want to have anything to do with each other. Should we not love more? Are we not our brother’s (sister’s, mother’s, father’s) keeper (Gen 4:9)?” Or is it exactly what we need to straighten out our misdirected focus on family members? We come away with a better grasp on what Jesus means if we go to the end of the Gospel and find another word that tempers Jesus’ word hate. It comes after Jesus has used two illustrations from the military to make his point. One about a builder of a tower and the other about a military leader who is making plans to fight a battle. I say two military illustrations because the Greek word for tower, purgos, originally meant “fortress” or “refuge.” Can the builder or the leader fulfill his goal if he doesn’t plan ahead? Can one be a disciple of Jesus if one loves one’s son or daughter, father or mother more than Jesus? As families grow and as children are exposed to the allurements of the adult world, a family member committed to our Lord often has to make a choice. Does she love and relate to the family member and give up on her Lord, or does she “love” the family member less and cling to her Lord above all else? For the best spiritual success in such a conflict, it is good to have a plan: put the remembrance of Jesus’ first.
8. The best results will take spiritual prioritizing. The tower won’t get built unless those building have done their planning, which means that money has been set aside, blueprints have been drawn up, the right supplies have been secured, and the workers schooled and trained in building it. The military attack won’t end in victory unless healthy troops are recruited and trained, the latest weapons have been secured, and a battle plan, as well as alternative plans, has been conceived.
9. And that brings us to the key word of this entire Gospel. It’s found in v 33. The NIV translates the Greek word apotassetaias “give up.” I don’t think this is a good translation. How can “giving up” be related to “hating” one’s father or mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters? My Greek lexicon offered other definitions. It can also mean “to renounce” or “to turn from” or “full separation from.” We’re back to C. S. Lewis’ interpretation of the passage, “to turn from the suggestions of the Devil.” Could it be that our noblest intentions could turn back on us and destroy our relationship with our Lord? Now taking that key word and looking back on that emotionally charged word hate, we can see that what Jesus is really doing isn’t fostering hate but challenging people—if they want to be his disciples—to prioritize what they love. Discipleship begins and ends with the disciple receiving the amazing compassion of Christ.
10. Jesus is telling us, “Set your priorities. Organize your life to include my love for you.” It’s too bad none of us were there when he said these words, because I believe that if we had heard him speak, we would have heard a deep tone of compassion in his voice, maybe even a pleading for us to get our priorities straight, for he, Jesus, is the personification of God’s covenantal compassion for his people. He is filled with this love for us and is intent on flooding all aspects of our lives with it.
11. I like the image found in the Hebrew word for “compassion,” rachem. It contains the same three consonants used in the Hebrew word for a woman’s womb. Ps 103:8, 13 says, “8 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love… 13 As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” The implication of this psalm is that, if God gives all in forgiving us all our sins, we ought to respond with all that we are too (Psalm 103:1-5). As far as I know, once the labor pains begin a woman doesn’t think about anything else but the birth of her child. And Jesus, in his great compassion for us, isn’t thinking about anything else than leading us to live in his love as his children. Follow him as he does his ministry among us. He has no other purpose than to flood us with his love, whether it’s to perform a miracle or to speak a parable or to challenge our commitments to whatever we find important. Jesus wasn’t thinking about anything else either when, in love for us, he laid down his life on the cross and when he was raised from the tomb. His death on the cross was the final fulfillment of what he had been doing for us all throughout his life. Anything that was a distraction from what he intended from us could be called into question. The love of father or mother, of wife or children, of brothers or sisters can get in the way of Jesus’ deep love for us. We are to be as tenacious about putting him first as focused as the builder of a tower, as tenacious as the military leader planning for battle. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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