Sunday message · Jesus’ Most Confounding series
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Message Summary
Continuing the series on Jesus’ most confounding statements, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Luke 14:25–35. Jesus tells the crowds that anyone who does not hate his own family, and even his own life, cannot be his disciple, nor can anyone who does not bear his own cross and come after him. Phil borrows a picture from N.T. Wright’s commentary on Luke: a politician promising voters higher taxes and the loss of their homes. Why would anyone advertise himself that way? Skeptics even call the passage a contradiction.
Some translations add “by comparison” to verse 26, Phil explains, because modern readers are unfamiliar with Semitic hyperbole. Luke is not teaching hatred. After showing how great Jesus is, Luke shifts here to showing how loving and compassionate he is. His first readers faced real persecution, and some had family members who said that if they followed Jesus, they were dead to them. They would see that Jesus never baited and switched his followers or promised them riches. He was honest that following him would look, by the world’s standards, like disdain for life and family.
Verse 27 is not Jesus pounding a pulpit, Phil says, but leaning in to tell people plainly what discipleship means. As one commentary notes, the first disciples had probably watched a man carry a cross out of a village with Roman soldiers, on a one-way journey. Drawing on pastor and author Larry Osborne, Phil explains that a cross is not ordinary hardship or the natural consequences of our own bad decisions. Some of us, he warns, think we are bearing a cross when we have never picked one up.
Bearing your cross, Phil says, is a sacrificial choice to live out the unique calling God has given you in a way that advances his mission. It is a choice, because following Jesus means denying self; in Matthew 16 Jesus says that whoever tries to hang on to his life will lose it. It is unique, so we should not copy someone else’s cross, whether Mother Teresa’s or Billy Graham’s, or impose ours on others. Planting Clarity was a hard and frightening call for his family, yet God put a desire in it. In John 21, when Peter asks about John’s future, Jesus tells him, in effect, to mind his own business and follow. And a cross advances God’s mission of making disciples who make disciples.
Phil ends with Wright’s second picture: an expedition leader taking urgent medical aid through a dangerous mountain pass tells his team to leave their packs behind and send their last postcards home, because some may not make it back, but it will be worth it. He leaves three questions. Do I really understand God’s mission? Is my heart increasingly changing for that mission in the unique place God has put me? What sacrificial choices have I made recently to bear my cross? He closes with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reminder in The Cost of Discipleship that the cross meets us at the very beginning of following Christ, who calls us to come and die.