Luke 14:25-33

Deut 30:15-20

Jesus is not very nice.

He speaks in parables, which are loosely defined in the field of literary criticism as a brief or extended metaphor that uses familiar and homey images to hurt the feelings of everyone who has ears to hear; the rhetorical version of Halloween candy laced with arsenic.

Consider the much-loved parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew’s gospel. The king issues invitations to his feast, but those invited ignore the invitation, and the servants are sent out to beat the bushes in order to find the least of these to come and fill the banquet hall. It’s a parable of radical inclusivity, a subversion of the social and economic order, and it’s exciting. But then comes the fatal aftertaste: one guest is found not wearing the right wedding garment, and is pitched out into that particularly toothy and gnashy kind of darkness.

Now Luke is always one for shaving off clauses here and there from Matthew’s verbal accoutrement, and so, in ch. 14, we get the inclusive feast without the bouncer scene at the end. Thanks be to God. But then, just as we’re about to go off embracing this anti-Matthean ethic of inclusivity, the scorpion’s tail whips over our shoulders and sticks us in the fleshy part of our backs. “He turned and said to them, ‘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.’” You see what Luke has done? Even though the Sabbath feast, which was the setting for the banquet parable, has ended, and Jesus has once again turned his face toward Jerusalem, the parable itself isn’t over yet: he turns to all those who have left everything to follow him on the road, who no doubt are assuming that they’re the ones drudged up from the highways and hedges and ushered to their places in the banquet all, and he points out to them to a table piled high not with settings for a feast, but instead with evidence that they, in fact, don’t belong there at all. Hatred of ones mother is the new wedding garment, and those not wearing this hate are rapidly dismissed from the table. Nasty little gospel. Just when we thought it was safe to pass the peace, it calls us to take up the sword. Just when we were ready to sink into its loving arms, it calls us to hate. Just when he says that all are invited to be his disciples, he implies with a biting irony that perhaps none of us, after all, are cut out for it.

Jesus also, from time to time, shows a severe lack of common sense. And especially the closer he gets to Jerusalem. Maybe it’s stress.

“Which of you intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and reckon the cost?” The answer, of course, is none of them, and likely none of us. It’s good common sense—what’s the point of a half-built tower? It stands there in the middle of the city serving no end beyond inspiring local “what’s the deal” jokes at the improv. Good common sense: consider the cost. But then as soon as they nod, Jesus huffs and says, “Exactly. That’s why you can’t follow me to Jerusalem.”

The Lukan Jesus has funny ideas about money, by the way. At the beginning, with the poverty of the manger scene and the leveling of valleys and hills by John the Baptist, we’re very much in the realm of the economics of the OT prophets: re-distribute wealth, and acknowledge God’s preferential option for the poor.

But increasingly, as he approaches Jerusalem, the parables get weirder. In ch 14, the hero is not the one who reckons his expenditures, but the one who refuses to: in fact, the one who gives everything away and then starts building a tower. In the next two chapters the heroes will be, respectively, a miserly old woman who invites her friends over because she found some bills she stashed under the sofa; a father with a bad habit of enabling his profusely prodigal son, and finally the conniving manager who “makes friends for himself by means of dishonest wealth”—thus at once providing us with an under-the-table model of eternal investment, and, over the table, a classic study in triangulation.

But the overturning of the economic justice preached by the prophets is only part of the revolution Luke paints as a kind of penumbra around Jesus’ head. The larger picture is of the internal superseding of Israel itself. Jesus is raised up as the subversive element within the very womb that nurtures him—the womb of Mary, which is to say the womb of Torah. He’s brought up alongside a baptizing Nazirite relative—which is to say, he’s kin to the Prophetic tradition. Yet Mary (the Law) will be disowned as his true mother, and John (the Prophets), who is the quintessential preacher of social justice, recognizes that one greater than himself—greater than the prophets, with an excessively greater message, is here. Jesus is, as Simeon and Anna knew, the tempest in the teapot of Israel’s faith, and for nine chapters we see him spurting and sputtering inside its belly. And then suddenly, as John fades to his own death, Jesus stands in the clearing, tests the winds, and turns his face toward Jerusalem. From here on the lid is blown off the teapot, and the storm will break on the darkness of a place called The Skull.

This tension lies in plain view on the surface of today’s lessons. Overstating the opposition between our Old Testament and New Testament reading perhaps only slightly: Torah calls us to choose the way of life which is “not too hard” for us; Jesus chooses the way of death, and none of us have what it takes—including perhaps Jesus himself. Its really himself he’s comparing to the one under-funded to complete the tower, the king whose annihilation on the battle field is a foregone conclusion. Allowing his followers the opportunity to count the cost is giving them a way out—it’s common sense: while the sense of Jesus’ path is far from common. On the way of the cross, counting the cost will be pointless, because Christ’s pockets will be empty.

Part of Luke’s point, though, is surely that the cross has always been the goal and fulfillment of Israel’s faith—this is why he has John standing there in chapter 7, searching for Christ, acknowledging Christ’s place above his own, and why the sword enters the heart of Mary as early as chapter 2. Mary and John, the Law and the Prophets, have been quietly pointing out the way of the cross all along.

But here, in a single peripatetic tirade, Jesus shatters the familial bonds and economic integrity and general common sense that are the warp and woof of the social fabric. What’s left of the Magnificat, after Jesus turns his back on his mother? What’s left of the leveling of the high and the raising of the low, once Jesus steps out from under John’s shadow? What’s left of social justice, after Jesus turns his comfortably inclusive parable into nightmare of exclusivity? What’s left of Israel, once Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem?

The way of the cross is not the path of common sense, nor the path of critical thought: it’s the path of uncommon nonsense, of metacritique. Nothing of common culture is left standing here: Jesus on the way to Jerusalem is a pyromaniac, burning the bridges not just behind him but in front of him as well: all those religious, social, familial, economic institutions that help keep him alive.

But let’s give an ear now to what is, after all, the real question the gospel asks of its readers:

What does it mean to stand with this Christ on this road? That, after all, is the only thing Christians hope to accomplish in the act of worship—to place ourselves on that road. What sort of place is that to stand?

There are those—well-meaning and God-fearing Christians, I have no doubt, populating both the left and the right of our current political scenery—who suppose that our strength is in numbers, that our calling is to join forces with a political party and sway votes and influence legislation. I often, to be honest, find their arguments compelling, and certainly the most plausible way of bringing change to the most deplorable of our laws and practices. But then I hear these words of Christ addressing me—give away all that you have, and then reckon the cost, and suddenly the idea of signing on to an agenda crafted to get things done within the machinery of our times is not near radical enough. The sense of those critiques is far too common.

For instance: One could stand outside the governor’s mansion with the anti-death penalty coalition during executions, and one could boycott hospitals and clinics where abortions are granted with an unreflective and well-reimbursed ease—and both of these protest activities would be necessary and good endeavors. The trouble is, neither go far enough. If we stop an execution, we’ll still have come up short of envisioning a prison system based in true universal atonement for sins. If we halt an abortion, we’ll congratulate ourselves before we ever get around to opposing a morality-defying health care system with the story of creatio ex nihilo and the gratuitous charity of God. Both of these examples of protest logic are founded on the old logic of counting the cost, of strategizing in the tent about the most effective way of launching an offensive. Neither type of protest takes place on the road to Jerusalem, where the sheer lack of common sense dooms Jesus’ “offensive” from the start.

On the other hand, we’re a church founded nowhere but on this Jerusalem path, and, had we but ears to hear and eyes to see, we might find around us all the makings of a truly radical way of living in the dense and crowded present. The logic of our liturgy, like the texts of today’s gospel, is infiltrated with a good heavy dose of Christic nonsense. Here where we burn our resources on the altar, sing the song of angels, and call the breaking and distribution of a body the gift of which all other gift-giving is but a shadow. How could we live into that logic in a world in which the sides, so often, have already been chosen, the battle lines already drawn—and drawn on a very different sort of map than ours? Maybe it would involve playing at a very different sort of game: Our move, say, might involve praying the office and reading the scriptures together in this chapel, but also vesting up and processing with the cross down to the governor’s mansion on the day of an execution, and sharing in the rite of reconciliation in the middle of Colorado Street. Or praying for the sick and dying here and at their bedsides in clinics and hospitals, but then also, as a properly Christian response to the horrifying mess of greed and capital that has overrun our health care system, invading the offices of the health department long enough to share in the service of holy unction. Or a thrice weekly breaking of consecrated bread here at this hour, but then marking the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with a eucharist on the grounds of Camp Mabry.

To be sure, there’d be more than just a bit of the smell of the holy fool to all of this. It would mean walking away having accomplished little, like a man who leaves a tower half-built. It would certainly make enemies—likely of both protestors and protested. It would be so much easier to send a delegation and ask for terms of peace from our enemies: to join one of the pre-formed and rhetoric-laden sides, and be pro-troops or anti-war, be pro-life or pro-choice. But what would it mean for us, here and now, to be pro-eucharist? Pro-gospel? Pro Way of the Cross? Wouldn’t that carve a deep slice through the mundane rhetoric of today’s “common sense,” and exceed any of these pre-established options? Doesn’t the eucharistic liturgy make all other protests look like the epitome of armchair anarchism?

I simply can’t see any another way of exegeting this passage, exegeting the entire subversive journey of Christ in Luke’s gospel. He turns his back on the social fabric, on common sense, on the wombs that bore him, even on inclusivity, and walks the way of the cross.

The key, I think, is in that final imperative to empty our pockets with Christ. The way of the cross dislocates us from everything that was, it relativizes our familial bonds within a larger family, with a new Mother called the church; it relativizes our grasp on wisdom and good judgment by celebrating prodigal gift-exchange. This is why, by the way, Jesus rejects something like a radical inclusivity here, and why, at the end of the day, inclusivity, like exclusivity, is not a Christian virtue. Both postures celebrate who we already are before following Christ on the road, and so both postures leave us untransformed. If we come to the feast, we come as disciples, willing to hate our relationships, our integrity, our personalities, our reputations, yes, even life itself.

Far riskier than counting the cost, far more foolish than making peace with our much stronger enemies. Reason enough, perhaps, for us to pause on the road, and consider cutting our losses and letting Christ walk alone with his face set towards Jerusalem.