NOTES for Luk 14:28
Jesus often connects the path into the Kingdom with a kind of assessment, calculation, and analysis of a person's possibilities. The one who intends to begin building must first assess his resources and understand whether they will be enough to complete the work; if not, it is better not to begin. Such an attitude is valid in any case when a spiritual path is in question.
Indeed, when setting out on a journey, we always hope to reach the goal, and we always try to understand how difficult and dangerous the road may prove to be, and whether it will be within our strength at all. And if this is true of every spiritual path, it is especially true when the Christian path is in question, because here the Kingdom is at stake, and the path into it is harder than any other, even though the Savior Himself constantly accompanies us on this path. Of course, if Christianity were simply one more new religion, the situation would be different. Every religion is to a certain degree an end in itself.
And even if something greater than itself is in question, every religious person can always comfort himself with the thought that, even if he has not reached that greater thing, he has still done something, and what he has done is valuable in itself. Usually a religious person in such cases says to himself and to others that he has done what he could and never counted on more; after all, he is not a saint or a righteous person, but an ordinary human being. But the point is that Christianity as a religion has no meaning at all.
Christianity is the path into the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom, and the only goal of a Christian can be the Kingdom in all its fullness; otherwise one should not even begin. This is what Jesus speaks about when He gives as an example the plan of a garden owner to build a watchtower. After all, an unfinished or badly built tower is not only useless, it can even do harm by creating for its builder an illusion of safety that does not actually exist. Then it would be better not to build anything at all.
So too a Christian who has not reached the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness can fall into a trap: it may seem to him that everything is in order with his spiritual life since he fulfills certain "religious duties of a Christian," while in reality he is no closer to the Kingdom than anyone else who does not think about religion at all. This is the maximum, the attainment of the goal, toward which Jesus directs His listeners, calling them to consider whether they are ready to go to the end, and if not, whether it would be better for them to leave Him and live their ordinary life, the life they lived before.