On counting the cost

 A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Luke 14: 25-33) sees Jesus turning to a large crowd and speaking to them some home truths. What must they have thought, these enthusiasts who followed after Him? For Jesus does not want enthusiasm; He wants fidelity, a completely different thing. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. These are not comforting words, no more than the words He had said first of all:

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.

 Thus, it would appear, Jesus expects them all to count the cost carefully before they follow Him. For in the rest of this gospel extract, he asks a series of rhetorical questions about those who begin a thing but cannot finish it. And what is that cost? Jesus answers with a rhetorical finish:

Therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

This gospel takes us back to another scene in the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus promised His disciples that they would be hated even by members of their own family because of their allegiance to Him. This time the cards are turned. Jesus tells his disciples flatly that they must hate all those nearest to them, otherwise, they cannot be His disciples. Here, as so often in the gospel, Jesus is in full hyperbolic mode and not for one instant does He mean that we must disobey the greatest commandment to love God and to love our neighbour; not for one instant does He demand that we do anything so unnatural as to break the fourth commandment to honour our mother and father; never is it in His plan that we should be perverse enough to detest our own flesh and blood.

What Jesus means here is to remind His disciples of His call to the two detachments without which we cannot embrace the one great love of our lives. For what is it to hate our mother and father or our wife and children other than to be detached from them in the deepest Christian sense of this word? Not to be detached in some unemotional way, but not to be so attached as to put them before God. Should we renounce our faith to save the life of a child? A secular pragmatist would say: absolutely. The son of God would say: those who try to save their lives in this world lose them in the next. This is why not even therapeutic abortion is possible. Does Jesus know what He is asking when He places this demand on us? Undoubtedly, yes, for He knows all things. He knows that our nearest and dearest are not simply close to our hearts; they live in our minds and dwell in our bones and bowels. If we love them, our hearts leap up to behold their smile, and our tears run freely at their grief. Hence, Jesus’ teaching in this gospel: He knows how much we are attached to those we love, for so was He attached to those He loved; to Mary and Joseph, to Martha, Mary and Lazarus. And yet, love of God came first, for He is the Lord our God above all things and Him only must we serve. No greater love is there than this that we lay down our lives for those we love, which we do even when we love God more than them.

Friendship runs as deep in me as it does in you, I think, Norfolk, but only God is love right through

says Thomas More to the Duke of Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons.

But then comes that second detachment, not now from others but from ourselves. And this detachment is much more difficult, requiring a deeper renunciation; it cuts through our very flesh and bone to reach the centre of our nervous systems. At the edges, this detachment requires our separation from the desires of this world, with all its riches and advantages. But thereafter, how much deeper a renunciation must take hold, a renunciation which requires our dethronement, the dethronement of our selfish wounded hearts, and the enthronement of the loving heart of God within the depths of our being. This is the meaning of incarnational when we speak of the charism of COLW. For this detachment from our very selves enables us to say with Saint Paul:

I live; now, not I but Christ lives in me.

How can we count the cost of this detachment from self? It is not just about the outward senses but also about the inward senses down to our most instinctive and autonomic levels. Our sense of safety, our sense of security, our sense of being and belonging: our very sense of self must be subsumed into the torrent of His eternal love:

That they may be one, Father, as you and I are one.

For our transformation into Christ in our very selves brings with it the mystery of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity, so that even the individual Christian, the lowly disciple of the Lord, the anawim, in their interior life reflects the interior life of the Incarnate God when He walked on earth within whose human soul was found the vision of the Blessed Trinity.

For all Jesus’ rhetoric in today's gospel, few of us have really counted the cost, and fewer still have paid it. If we had, we would already have set the world on fire. But this is our duty now. This is our calling; the universal call to holiness has gone out. And the carrying of the cross which Jesus calls us to today, the fiat in sorrow that we must offer as we offer the fiat in joy, is only the messy side of the tapestry on the other side of which is the extraordinary prospect of the God of Eternal Beauty who poured himself out so that we might share in His Eternal love.