NOTES for Luk 14:25-33
At first sight, today's Gospel reading seems very illogical. The parables of the tower-builder and the beginning of a war are not really parables at all, but real-life situations we face every day. To undertake a difficult and dangerous task only after calculating the consequences is something we have been trying to learn since childhood. Most failures arise precisely because, when making a decision, we usually simply do not take the trouble to assess the full extent of the negative consequences. Most often, this is also why the Bible falls ‘out of favour’: it tells us, ‘Do not rush; think. There are laws you know and must not disregard, or you will perish.’ We know this function of Scripture very well—and dislike it intensely. Here, too, the parables would seem to be telling us the same thing. Yet the conclusion drawn from them is entirely different: ‘…any of you who does not renounce everything he has cannot be My disciple.’ In other words, Jesus knows very well that the war we are entering, the tower we must build, the desire to be His disciple—and therefore to fulfil the commandment of love of which the Epistle to the Romans reminds us—all this is, from the standpoint of common sense, an unrealistic undertaking. If we sit down and calculate what fulfilling the law of love will demand of us, if we realise what we are taking on when we tear ourselves away from evil, then all the common sense within us will demand that we end this struggle immediately. The simple instinct of self-preservation makes us abandon this path. Thus we come upon the one exception to following common sense, an exception that only confirms the rule given to us by Scripture. You cannot fulfil the commandment of love without Jesus; but when you decide to follow Him, do not think about what this path will demand. In the end, only He knows the final price of that choice.