“Now
great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes
to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and
brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come
after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower,
does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete
it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who
see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to
finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit
down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who
comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a
great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.” Lk
14:25-32 (ESV)
You know, every time I think I have God, or life,
pretty well figured out and I start rummaging through the Bible, then-ZAP! Some
new shaft of light shatters my neat little God-package or life-package. My cozy
figuring out is undercut or deflated, and I've got to take a fresh look at the
whole business again.
Of course if this didn't happen the Bible
would have no authority for us. It
would not convey a word from the beyond at all; it would simply be a dull,
commonplace book, handy to have around to confirm me in my prejudices and
partial understandings. Inasmuch as the Bible is the Word of God, then by its very nature it has to startle, confuse, mess-with, surprise and shake us up.
The Word of God refuses to let me spell me, my life, or God, with the
letters of my alphabet.
A case in point are the two little parables in the
fourteenth chapter of Luke about a man building a tower and a king planning
warfare. So
what's so surprising about all that? Isn't this just ordinary folk wisdom, hard
business sense, sound military strategy? The boardroom of a big corporation,
with sound business heads deciding on expansion on the basis of costs, earning
capacity, and the state of the economy? Or the high strategy session in the
Pentagon, with colonels and generals figuring out every deployment, the state
of the military budget, and probable body-count? Or a family sitting down to
decide whether they can manage the mortgage payments on a new house? No,
there's nothing very surprising here; it's just plain horse sense to count up
the cost before making a venture.
What
is surprising is what it does to a totally different approach to discipleship,
to the expression of love, in so much of the New Testament where the emphasis
is just the opposite of this prudent, cautious, cost-counting approach. It's
the mystery, the wonder of love offered spontaneously, freely, with abandon.
How
many times shall I forgive – seven times? No, seventy times seven.
If a
man forces you to go one mile, go with him two.
If
he strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left, and if he wants your
corduroy jacket, offer him your topcoat too.
If
you love those who respond to you in friendship and love, so what? Love your
enemies where you can count on nothing in return. If the wine at the wedding
feast runs low, I'll drown them in more wine than they can possibly drink.
And
who ends up in outer darkness? The one-talent man who was precisely the
cautious, prudent, counting-the-cost kind of guy.
So
Jesus lived, apparently, with an abandon of love, scattering His seed over all
kinds of ground, not counting the cost of scattering seed on beaten paths, on
rocks, or among weeds.
So Jesus
went about offering His unconditional love to every Tom, Dick, and Harry:
prostitutes, call girls, racketeers, blind beggars, and God knows what all! The
spontaneity of it, the uncalculating spirit, the generosity of it – this is
what makes it a mystery and gives it wonder, and draws us to Him.
It's the spontaneous,
uncalculating expression of love, of care for others, which seems closest to
the spirit of Christ and gives life much of its wonder, mystery, and joy. It is
perhaps the one quality above all others that has come to dominate the
definition of Christian love and Christian mission.
Such
is how I thought I had it all figured out. That it is precisely this delightful
spontaneity, this not counting the cost, which is of the essence of
Christian love, of the way God would have it happen among us, and approach the
work of His Church.
So
what gives with Jesus suddenly talking about calculating the cost? The ridicule
heaped on the tower builder who had not counted the cost and wasn't able to
finish? Or the king waging warfare who was commended because he was willing to
compromise when he found he was outmanned by the opposition?
Good
God, isn't it better to venture love even if we can't carry through on it?
Isn't
it better to fight for love and justice in our world even if we know that the
opposition will probably shoot us down?
At
least this is the quality which draws us to make heroes isn’t it?
So
what goes on here? Well, for one thing, in the context of His words, Jesus’
words suggest that the spontaneous offers of love, service, sacrifice and even
mission work, may well be no more than an emotional kick, an expression of
feelings, our feelings, rather than a consideration of the effect that those
feelings may have on others, especially the one so emotionally moved.
You
recall that incident along the road where a woman, all carried away with her
emotions, blurted out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you
nursed!” (Lk
11:27). To which Jesus replied tartly,
"Blessed rather are those
who hear the word of God and keep it!" (Lk
11:28). He was not about to let that woman get away with an outburst of
feelings without counting the cost of what it did mean for Mary to have such a
son, with the sword piercing her soul down through the years.
What
Jesus is saying in these two little parables is that there is something demonic
about love that does not count the cost and, having counted the cost, carry
through on it.
No doubt this is why Luke places these two
illustrations immediately after bluntly stating: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his
own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and
even his own life, he cannot be my
disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Lk
14:26-27)
To
say Jesus is indicating that love for the neighbor immediately establishes
priorities is not to water down his word one bit: those priorities can be
devastating to our normal way of living!
Paul
Monka in his delightful little book Meditations in Universe, provides
what is perhaps the most erroneous, and yet the most appealed to justification
when spontaneity wears off: "All's well that means well." Nothing
could be farther from the truth and what our Lord is getting at here.
The
world is full of grief and loneliness and tragedy because of people like you
and me who meant well, but didn't count the cost. The tragedy that seems to
unfortunately define the African-American community in our country results not
alone from the arrant racists, prejudiced and bigoted, as found in the popular
spin, but from a hundred plus years of people on both sides of the issue,
people like you and me who meant well.
What
is the tragedy? Seldom has anyone really faced up to, and owned the cost of it
all!
God
help the neighbor if our love for him begins and ends simply with our feelings
for him. Why is it most mission leaders and organizations are lost as to how to
do missions? If you look behind the charts, demographics and into the toolboxes
they’ve made for themselves, they cannot find any easy, quick, micro-wave type
way of loving the lost cheaply. The faithfulness, the ongoing, the enduring
path of missions isn’t an option because it cost too much, we can’t get it to
be self-sustaining. How ironic that we, who cannot live a moment without the
Lord’s love, expect those we love to get to a point that they can live without
our love and all that it supplies. How shall we ever get to loving our enemies
and doing good to those who persecute us.
Beyond
that, these little parables suggest that love had better take sharp stock of
the nature, quality, and size of the opposition. We'd better know what we're up
against, and what we're up against is the monumental tragedy in human life, as
well as human perversity, evil, and sin. All in all, that is awesome
opposition. Which is why the basic ingredient in the Biblical understanding of
love, whether divine or human, is not
the feeling of love, but faithfulness.
It is God's faithful love which is asserted over and over again in the
Old Testament. And when Job and others questioned the love of God for them, it
was the faithfulness of that love in times of suffering and death which was in
question. And in the New Testament it is the faithfulness of love even unto
death which is central.
In
how many marriage ceremonies has what is pledged been changed from a pledge to
be faithful, to a pledge to love? As God instituted it, marriage is not first
and foremost about pledging our feelings of love, but the pledging of our faithfulness
in sickness and in health, for better or worse.
And
as for friendship, you know from your own experience it is the faithful ones,
those who stick by you no matter what, who are the treasured ones. Others may
be more fun to be with, more charming, but, by God, when the chips are down
it's the faithful ones we are grateful for, even if they happen to be pretty
dull customers.
Rollo
May points out the need for faithfulness in love by contrasting it with the
hippie movement back in the 60’s and 70’s.
Hippie love emphasizes
immediacy, spontaneity, and the emotional honesty of the temporary moment....
The immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty of the relationship experienced in the
vital now are sound. . . . But love also requires enduringness. Love
grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other,
conflict and growth, all over a period of time. These cannot be omitted from
any lasting and viable experience of love.
While
this movement reminds us of the wonder and mystery of love's spontaneity, it
still does so without love’s enduringness or faithfulness, so that it droops
and fades.
This
can best be summed up in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who points out that God defines love; love does not define God.
And as God defines love, it is both
spontaneous, free, uncalculating, given with abandon and at
the same time prudent, cautious, aware of the cost and the opposition.
The
old, old story of the Good Samaritan still tells it best: There was the
spontaneous and immediate seizure of the moment, the now, in response to the
poor guy in the ditch beside the road. But that was not all. He counted the cost,
picked him up, set him on his donkey, took him to the inn, and saw to it that
he was cared for. He saw it through. Both spontaneity and faithfulness.
If
we have to sacrifice one for the other, faithfulness is more to be desired than
spontaneity. Love without spontaneity can of course, as many today complain, be
dull and drab, boring, lacking the flash that generates not faithfulness of love,
but its feelings. But love without faithfulness is chaotic, if not demonic.
It
isn’t by mistake that much of the mission work within the church has long been
dominated by spontaneity rather than faithfulness. How much of our mission
effort is driven by the fact that we can count the number of flashes of mission
that catch and wow the eyes of all, but faithfulness, how can we count that in
anything but cost?
Any
attempt in fulfilling the great commission must live according to the mysterious,
wondrous love that is faithful and steadfast. For this is the very way God –
Father, Son and Holy Spirit set upon both the creation and salvation of the
entire world.
Perhaps
the reason this way of doing both Church and mission has been abandoned by so
many is because when both are held together –the instant feeling of compassion,
the warmth, the spontaneity, plus the counting the cost of faithfulness –
then we are defining love as God defines it, not spelling it by the letters of
our own alphabet.
By Edmund Steimle, God the Stranger
Revised and edited by Pastor Mark W. Love.
