Jesus has a sense of humor. This Sunday’s Gospel lesson, Luke 14:25-33, proves it. Jesus told a couple of snarky little parables which very likely pointed a grinning finger at recent public events and the associated personages, a tower builder who did not calculate the cost needed for his project and could not complete it, and a king going out to war without determining whether the size of his military was sufficient against the force of the enemy. Both enterprises were absurd failures. We might consider those stories in relation to public figures and events today.
Jesus’ lesson was, of course, about counting the cost of following Him, what Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously termed, “The Cost of Discipleship.” He began the whole speech with the difficult demand that those who follow Him “hate” father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters. We’re helped with that word a little by biblical scholars who tell us it’s a Hebrew way of saying we must love Jesus more than all those family members. Yet even that is not simple and without cost. We reflected on that struggle to put Jesus first a few weeks ago in Luke 9:57-62.
People who make huge sacrifices without visible tangible benefits tend to be scorned. An entrepreneur who racks up large debt to get a small business started is a genius if money starts rolling in, but questions begin to arise if time goes by and no profit appears. For instance, financial folks are beginning to wonder about Uber, which, despite incredible growth in revenue, has never turned a profit and lost 5 billion dollars in the second quarter of this year.
Business failures, political failures, military failures are all the subject of satire and public scorn. Some would call such people “losers,” and profess a preference for “winners.”
Jesus, however, likes losers. Not those who suffer large financial or power losses because they’ve failed to carefully discern the cost of their fiscal, political or military ventures, but Jesus likes those who are ready to lose what they have in pursuit of the one venture in life which really matters, the one enterprise which produces a truly lasting profit. It’s the adventure of following Him.
In fact, Jesus says we cannot really follow Him if we are unwilling to be losers, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Not many of us take that too seriously, it seems. Maybe we are the losers for it.