I am a good-deal kind of guy. And I come from a long line of good-deal kind of people. My parents, George and Val, whom some of you have gotten to know over the past year, have been furnishing their new house here in Dallas. They’ve found a guy in Forney who has just what you need at just the right price. Everybody needs “a guy.” Have you got a guy? They also love the estate sales. Every time I go to their house now, they have to show me the new table or chairs or credenza or whatever. But the story always ends with an extended breath that leads to the punch line: … and you won’t believe what we paid for it …!

I’m the same way. Give me a 50 percent off sale and I’ll buy two, maybe four—even if I don’t need one! And when Kim comes home with a new this or that and I ask “how much,” she usually doesn’t tell me the price; she tells me how much she saved. Smart girl. But I’m on to her. And I’m on to her because I’m on to me.

What about you? Being thrifty is a virtue, of course, but thriftiness has more to do with making do with what you have and learning to need less than with cutting costs on what you want but don’t really need. We have made a virtue of cost-cutting. But is it a spiritual virtue? Jesus seems to challenge that in this passage. He makes some bold and difficult statements about what it costs to follow him. And clearly, he’s not in a bargaining mood.

This passage comes right on the heels of a parable Jesus told about a king who throws a dinner party and invites all the usual suspects from the upper middle class of Dallas. He sends out his servant to announce that the dinner is ready, so they can all come now, and he gets one excuse after another. I have just bought a lake house, one says, and I have to go look after it. Another says, I have just started a new business and I can’t come right now. And the third says, I have just gotten married, and we need a few years to have fun together on the weekends. Thanks anyway. Okay, so I have modernized their answers a bit, but that’s basically what they say. Now, they all still want to be in good graces with the king and take advantage of all the benefits of being on the A-list and receiving his protection and blessing, but they want to make their own deal about how the relationship is structured. They don’t want to have to jump when he calls. So in the parable Jesus says the king sends out another invitation to the bunch that hangs out under the I-45 overpass. They come running and join the party—no excuses, no delays.

Jesus follows up with a bit of straight talk to the large crowds that have been following him: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. He then adds two examples of those who would rather cut costs than count costs. A certain pastor sets out to build a new house and figures it will cost only so much … and it ends up costing so much more. A certain Defense Department figures you can wage a successful war with fewer troops than turn out to be needed. Whew! What’s up with Jesus being so intolerably relevant? And then he concludes with the knockout punch: Therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Jesus wants us to cart our cross, not cut our costs. He wants us to understand that our allegiance to him must be total, and we have to consider all other loyalties in light of that single primary loyalty.

But his words seem harsh and unrealistic, don’t they? I mean, what about the part about hating our families? Doesn’t seem like a very Christian thing to do, does it? I mean, isn’t part of being a Christian that we have a higher devotion to family than those who undermine the family unit by their selfish pursuits? Isn’t being a good family man or woman a hallmark of true Christianity? And what about this part about hating even life itself? Isn’t Christianity pro-life? Isn’t knowing that you are a child of God an antidote to low self-esteem? And what about the whole give-up-all-your possessions thing? Aren’t Christians supposed to be good stewards of their wealth and give only 10% as a sign of faithfulness?

Well, let’s look at it a little closer. The common reaction to Jesus’ words about hating family and even one’s own life is that he is exaggerating to make a point. He’s just being a preacher, don’t you know?! In the trade we call that “ministerial speaking.” Jesus was just making a point in the strongest possible way; he didn’t really mean it literally.

That might be true to some extent, but we need to learn what the word hate meant coming off his tongue. If he had grown up in my house, his mother would have told him, We don’t use that word around here. You may dislike intensely, but you may not hate. But the Greek word miseo is used to translate the Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken. And what you have to know about the Hebrew language in general, even its latter dialect, Aramaic, is that the vocabulary is spare. Whereas in English we might have three or four words that can express the nuances of meaning in any context, the way a box of 64 Crayolas can offer shades of color, Hebrew is a five-pack of primary colors. So,when the Old Testament character Jacob finally got the love of his life, Rachel, after having to marry her older sister, Leah, the Hebrew says that Jacob loved Rachel more than he loved Leah. It then goes on to say that the Lord saw that Jacob loved Rachel and hated Leah. The context suggests that hate means he loved Rachel more or preferred her more. In a parallel passage in Matthew, Jesus says almost the same words as in Luke, but Matthew—whose gospel is more Jewish than Luke’s, which is more Greek—says, Anyone who loves father or mother (or son or daughter) more than me is not worthy of me.

So what we have here is Jesus using the most striking language possible to show that following Christ and putting God first in all things require cutting the cord, so to speak. And that’s not so easily done, is it?

You mothers know the joy and relief of childbirth after all the labor. But there comes that moment when the umbilical cord is cut and the child is no longer a part of your flesh. From the time that child comes out, she is leaving you, and you are wrestling to pull her closer. One of the ways we do that with our kids is to love them so much that we would do anything for them. We think of them as our number-one priorities, and we would sacrifice anything for them. We can love our children too much.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother loved him too much. She decided when he was in the womb that he would be an architect. In Ada Louise Huxtable’s biography about America’s most famous architect, she says that his mother put up pictures of cathedrals around his crib, cultivated his aesthetic interests, and nurtured his thoughts to that end. No matter what the boy did, his mother always “understood.” She sponsored him and bailed him out of jams and followed him around, even living with him and his wives and numerous mistresses. She was always there, Huxtable says, through guile, persistence, uncritical devotion, and sheer determination—that eternal motivational mix called mother love. She co-opted his loyalty through single-minded possessiveness and support.[i]

That word possessiveness? Same root as possessions. Unless you give up all your possessions, you cannot be my disciple. The thing about possessions is that you think you possess them, but they can also possess you. What Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother did was to make her son into a god to be possessed and worshiped. She would sacrifice anything, including what was right and wrong, to serve him.

Let me ask you, parents: are your children more important to you than following Christ? How do you know? Well, what preoccupies your time and the schedules you keep? Is it more important to you that you are answering God’s claim upon your life and family that you see to it that they are learning to pray and knowing the Bible and making decisions about their lives that would glorify God? Or do those things take second place or worse in favor of the right friends and the right school and the right teams they play on? And what about the way you spend the money God has entrusted to you? Does God get the first share of your income—or the last cent if any is left over? These are ways you can tell whether you love Christ more than you love your kids.

But just as parents can go overboard and turn their kids into possessions in the name of love, so can kids do that with their parents. We can turn our parents into gods whom we possess for our own purposes. If you cannot shake free of the need for your father’s blessing or your mother’s love so that you can get on with the bigger and most important question of how to love and serve your heavenly father, then you have made your parents into gods, and you are guilty of idolatry. Just as it is your parents’ responsibility to cart the cross first by cutting you loose, so you must cart the cross by cutting them free. You may think they have a hold on you that they never let go, but it may be you that will not let them go. You have to love Christ more than your parents. And how will you know if you do? Well, do you worry more about what Christ thinks of you or what your parents think? Do you long more to serve the kingdom of God or to make them proud? Do you want more to know the blessing of your parents or the blessing of God?

For some of you it may be anger or resentment or bitterness toward your parents that controls your soul more than a longing for their love. It may be the same, Jesus tells us, for those who cannot let go of the hurt from a child that disappoints or turns his back on you, a spouse that chose divorce, or a sibling that is your eternal rival. Listen to Christ again: you must love him more than you love them. Forgive them. To forgive means to let be, to let go. It means to cut the umbilical cord that is wrapped around your heart so that your heart can belong to Christ.

Most of us are guilty in one way or another of Jesus’ accusation. We would rather cut our costs, make a deal with him, negotiate a way to live our lives the way we really want to rather than the way he demands. But as long as we do, we are not really his disciples. We are not his followers. We are trying to lead him. We refuse to count the cost and cart our cross because we would rather cut our cost and leave the cross.

This is why we never get any simple little formulas for what it means to a Christian in the New Testament. A woman named Irena met a Christian missionary on a Moscow subway one day. He began to witness to her and shared with her the so-called Four Spiritual Laws. He assured her that all she had to do was pray a simple prayer and accept Jesus and that was all there was to it. Recounting the encounter fifteen years later, she said, You Americans make it sound like being a Christian is so simple and easy; for us Russians it is more difficult.[ii]

No, Irena, in actual fact, for all of us who are willing to cart the cross rather than cut the cost, it is more difficult. As least that’s what Jesus seems to say.

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