Does this sound familiar? You’re six years old and you can’t reach the cookie jar on the counter. You drag a chair over and climb up and just as you’re about to reach the prize your mother walks in and says, “Get down off there before you fall and break your neck.” Or, you’re doing homework on the dining table next to your sister and you start having a sword fight with your pencils and your mother sees you and says, “Cut that out before you poke your eye out.” Or, you’re sitting minding your own business watching TV and your mother comes in and says, “I’ve told you a million times to take the trash out.” When you point out that, in all likelihood, you won’t break your neck or poke out your eye and her reminders have been far fewer than one million mother responds, “Hyperbole added for emphasis.” My mother was in the habit of exaggerating the consequences in order to get her point across.
Jesus, like my mother, added hyperbole for emphasis: hate your relatives, deny yourself, renounce all possessions. Jesus used exaggerated language to make sure we got the point that being his disciple was costly. We aren’t disciples of Jesus by treating it as a hobby, as pastime, an added bonus to life. Discipleship changes the entire way we look at things, we think about things, we act on things. Married couples know instinctively what Jesus means because they know the cost of their relationship. Once they got married, they learned to look at things from the perspective of “we” and not just of me. They had to die to their individual lives in the interest of the deeper and wider life they would have in common. The cost of being married was a death to self. Parents know instinctively what Jesus means about the cost. They have had to reorient their entire lives to care for their children. Their time is no longer their own. The finances are now geared toward caring for their children. They have to put their children’s needs ahead of theirs. Parents deny themselves as the cost of having children. Athletes know instinctively about the cost of success at their sport. They make sure they eat the right things, do their exercises, get adequate rest, stretch out, pump iron, practice over and over again. Athletes can’t run around like their peers if they want to be successful at their sport. Being an athlete costs.
Jesus says that being his disciple is similarly costly. For example, a disciple has to change the fundamental question of life from “what do I want to do” to “what does God want me to do.” Our normal tendency is to look at what we enjoy doing and ask God to help us to accomplish that goal. Discipleship requires that we flip that on its head and say to ourselves, “God has blessed me in so many ways. How can I live in such a way to use my gifts as a way of giving thanks to God?” A disciple does not ask God to help me to accomplish my goals; rather, we seek first to know what God wants for my life and respond with generosity. The cost of discipleship also includes the way we treat others. The temptation is to divide the world: friends and enemies, neighbors and strangers, natives and foreigners, men and women, black and white, like me and unlike me. Discipleship demands that we throw out divisive distinctions. We are all one in Christ, all children of God, all made in God’s image and likeness, all precious in God’s sight. The cost of discipleship is that we must give up the safe cocoon of having two groups in my life: people that I care about and the “others” whom I can ignore. Rather, every person has a claim on us since we are all members of the same family, the family of God.
Another cost of discipleship is a literal one. Being a disciple can hit our pocketbooks. That is what lies behind the epistle for today where St. Paul is writing to his friend Philemon. The background: Philemon was a slave owner and one of his slaves, Onesimus, had run away. Onesimus somehow connected with Paul and was converted to Christianity. Paul, being a loyal Roman citizen, knew he had to return a runaway slave to his owner but he understood that according to the law Onesimus could be severely punished, even having his foot cut off so he wouldn’t run away again. So Paul writes to Philemon and basically guilt trips him. I am sending the newly baptized Onesimus back to you, my old friend, “that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but as more that a slave, a brother…. Welcome him as you would welcome me.” Herein lies Philemon’s dilemma. Let’s say he does what Paul asks and accepts the newly Christian Onesimus as a brother. He’ll be out one slave but he could probably absorb that loss. But what will all his other slaves think? “Hey, Onesimus was freed because he became a Christian. I’ll become a Christian too and then my owner will free me as well.” The Bible doesn’t tell us how Philemon resolved his dilemma but the letter is included in the Bible because it illustrates that following Jesus impacts all that we are, including our bottom line. This is not simply a lesson from history but current events as well. How we use our monetary resources must be viewed through the eyes of faith. For a disciple of Christ the monies we have are meant to help us fulfill our role in bringing about the kingdom of God. That will look different for each one of us but all of us must ask: what is God’s will for what I have acquired. The lesson of the gospel: for the disciples of Jesua everything about us – money, family, time, health, relationships – only makes sense when it helps us connect with God. God’s grace is free, but it costs.
