Cost of discipleship – 6 September 2013

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple  [Luke 14:27]. 

All through the years, Jesus’s uncompromising statements about discipleship have seemed to me something of a stumbling block.  Jesus did not live in  the world I live in, our capitalist, consumerist, competitive western society...  He certainly did not experience the realities and compromises of a middle-class suburban parish, to whom I was supposed to teach these things.  First century peasant farmers and fishermen, their wives and families, might be willing and able to leave all and follow him.  It’s more complex for those of us raised with our cynicisms about idealism, and all our self-protective mechanisms.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write, When Jesus calls us, he calls us to come and die.  But that was in the desperate circumstances of Nazi Germany, and the very real, very likely lethal questions about who is my Führer, Hitler or Christ...? 

I haven’t read to you the gospel lesson for next Sunday, but when you hear it you will see what I mean.  It is the bit which includes: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.  And I at any rate choose to state the obvious in reply:  It’s not either/or.  My love for my family is not in competition with my love for God.  As for my love of life...?  It is enhancing my faith.

Well now, having cleared the ground a little, we get down to business... All the teachers of Christian contemplative life and prayer emphasise, one way or another, the basic necessity of consent.  And this is the key to it.  Our stillness and silence are the arena in which, while we are awake and paying attention, we breathe our unconditional Yes to God in Christ.  Surrounded and interrupted by all the distractions, memories, reminders, hopes and anxieties, doubts and regrets, and all our day-dreaming, yet in our discipline we repeatedly return to this consent, this Yes to God.  It has taken priority.  It is certainly not that we “hate” anyone or anything – I don’t know why Jesus said that – perhaps it reflects the desperate choices sometimes needing to be made in the early church under persecution.  It is rather that we have chosen God at the centre, and we are in no doubt or hesitation about that.  We have not waited until all our questions were resolved and our doubts assuaged.  Indeed, we are very well aware that much remains opaque and mysterious, perhaps even more so as time goes by. 

Carrying the cross, it seems to me, is a specially vivid image.  It implies that our consent, being unequivocal, may include adversity, pain and death.  No one in a healthy state of mind wants any of that.  But it is everywhere in our world.  We may, as Dylan Thomas put it, rage against the dying of the light.  We may work day and night to relieve warfare, suffering and disease, and deal with their causes.  But our pathway remains the one Jesus took, no kind of escape or special personal protection, but always deep into life and mortality.