Discipleship

What if we’ve got the tone wrong?

When you read the following words of Jesus, what tone or motivation do you attribute to Jesus? “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves…” Luke 9:23

Does the voice in your head sound harsh, strict, commanding? Do you hear this as a rebuke? As a “come on and get it together?” Or perhaps as a word from a coach threatening that she’s going to cut you from the team if you don’t shape up?

As a pastor I wonder if our internal voice and tone is wrong when we read some of the words of Jesus. What if Jesus is not rebuking His disciples when He says. “You can’t be my disciples unless you deny yourselves?” What if this is not first and foremost a demanding word that is commanding them to make a decision right then or he’s going to cut them off.

Matthew does bring us Jesus the Messiah who is King, but what if Jesus is saying these words tenderly and with empathy? What if He is offering His disciples radical acceptance and a gift of agency that can be fuelled into something wonderful by the Spirit of God? What if he is inviting them into a process and not just a decision.

Intrigued?

First let’s start with the words of Jesus. But let’s include them in the context provided by Luke.

Luke sets the scene as a private prayer session in which Jesus asks the disciples “Who do the crowds say I am?” They have various answers but then he asks them, “What about you? Who do you say I am?” Peter answers, “God’s Messiah.”

The answer should have set off fireworks and all the choirs of heaven. But Jesus “strictly warns them” to not tell this to anyone. Jesus goes on to tell them about what is coming or rather what He is going to. “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

Now if you were a follower of Jesus and had already experienced so many amazing and wonderful things with Him, these prophetic words would be terribly disturbing. This is dark stuff. This is evil stuff. This is the establishment of Jerusalem rejecting your rabbi and contributing to his death. At least Jesus ended with the words “raised to life” but those may have sounded like a faint-hope-clause for the general resurrection. The words that would have troubled you the most would be “suffering many things,” “be rejected” and “be killed.” Perhaps you would wonder, “All of this because Jesus is God’s Messiah?”

I think Jesus read the faces and hearts of the people, his close followers, gathered with Him in this outdoor prayer room.

He knew what they wanted:
— They wanted to be his disciples.
— They wanted to save their lives (and His) from such a terrible fate.

— They wanted to gain the world. (Isn’t that what some of them, especially the zealots, were
     following Him? A kingdom and glory right?
— They want to not lose their lives.

— They wanted to avoid being shamed.
— They wanted to see the Kingdom of God.

These they wanted, so he addressed their wants and the internal conflict that rapidly raced through their hearts shaped by desires brought up by Jesus’ calm pronouncement of what awaited Him in the future and in Jerusalem.

Luke 9:23 is commonly referenced among evangelicals as a classic call of discipleship. And it is. It’s just that the context requires us to look for the pastoral concern Jesus has for these who have already devoted their days if not their lives to Him. The disciples of Jesus where hearing this call not because they had done something wrong or had been negligent in their spiritual disciplines. They were hearing this call because Jesus whom they were following announced that He was walking into a storm of suffering. This is His future. They are hearing this because they are distressed and confused by Jesus’ prophetic word about Himself. If they are going to accompany Him into that future they will have to enter into a work of the heart in which the “costs” and the possibilities of suffering with Him are engaged.

Let’s see what Jesus says to them:

23Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. 24For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. 25What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self? 26Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

27 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

So make sure you get the picture. Jesus is looking at his disciples full in the face. He is speaking to them with affection. He recognizes how disturbing the prospect of His rejection, suffering, and death is to them. He is reorienting them to the life of the Messiah. He is reorienting them to life with Him. Jesus is operating toward them with radical acceptance. Jesus accepts what is in their hearts. Jesus accepts what is in the hearts of the Jerusalem establishment. Jesus accepts the pathway for their communion with the Father and the Spirit. And if they are going to be with Him on this path, Jesus enters into the necessary dialogue of the heart that they are going to have daily in order to remain with Him.

Reading this text, we are drawn into a conversation with competing desires. I want to be with Jesus but I’m going to have to deny myself. What part of myself must be denied? The part that is reluctant for or refuses a cross.

With the word “cross” Jesus casts their life with Him into real, earthy, public, and conflictual terms. Perhaps they had all been traumatized by the bloody scenes of Roman enforcement against those deemed as troublemakers and criminals to the State. There was no romance associated with the cross. It was an execution stake, capital punishment at its worst. 

There is an internal calculus going on. One factor operating within the disciples of Jesus is God’s gracious gift of faith in Jesus. Being loved and known by God generates love and loyalty. Another factor operating within the disciples of Jesus is the reflexive retraction from horrible humiliation and suffering. No one really wants to be lumped in with a felon under a death sentence. But Jesus calmly asserts reality and invites them into a full body discipleship that must reckon with loss and with self-protectionism. He wants them to face the self-protectionism that would alienate them from Him. It must be denied a ruling and controlling place in their lives. But how?

Jesus’ radical acceptance of His futures and their futures looks beyond the bleakness cast by the shadow of a Roman cross. Because Jesus knows the beauty of His glory and His Kingdom as an end and a reality that is breaking in and will break in to life as they know it, He seeks to persuade the disciples to join Him in a reasonable spiritual conversation that they must have in order to not shrink back from Him. This conversation battles the daily “deaths” that may come because they are full heartedly following Him in a world ruled by powers that kill, steal, and destroy. Jesus provides them and us as His followers today a script for confession and a process for denying ourselves, taking up our crosses daily, and following Him.

The Reasonable Script

The disciples with Luke preserved Jesus’ teaching as a script for the church, a people who now by the Spirit are in Christ and who still face the disequilibrium of following Jesus into discomfort and alienation with the world.

Verse 24. Save your life. Yes I want to save my life. I want to save my life from rejection, pain, and death. I want to save my life for acceptance, comfort, and life to the fullest. But Jesus says that my strategies for doing this will be futile. My strategies have no ultimate power over death, but, Jesus does. Jesus can transform the weapons of the world (and of Satan). I can save my life by losing my life to Jesus. The desire that would deny, that would turn away from close friendship with Him and from the adoption of Jesus’ ways in the world, must be brought to Jesus — where I let them go. I reject their hold on me. I renounce them. These strategies so often shaped by the denial of the truth and by efforts to avoid awkwardness, inadequacy, weakness, and vulnerability seem to give life but are actually causing me to lose my life.

Verse 25. Gain the world. Yes I want to gain the world. I want the stuff, I want the power, the prestige, and the privilege. I want to be loveable and loved. I want the affection and applause of others. What the world requires for my comfort I will become.  But Jesus says that my strategies for gaining the world are too costly. I forfeit my soul. To forfeit is to abandon something that is supposed to be “mine.” To forget it is to relinquish what could be mine. To forfeit soul is to become a hollowed out person; to be dehumanized, to abandon genuine agency for life and to be taken under the powers of death. To live without soul is to abandon the character of the Creator revealed by Christ Jesus who creates anew through generosity, service, and love. To forfeit one’s soul for the world is to mistake the worth of what the world seems to offer over the incredible worth of the soul filled with the Spirit of God. To forfeit soul is to reject being known and loved by God who created me, and gave Himself to eternally love me.

Vese 26. Avoid shame. Yes I want to avoid shame. It’s so painful. Avoiding embarrassment has been programmed into me from the beginning. Some in the world have become masters of wielding shame as a tool to control and bluntly nudge people into doing what they want. Being associated with a crucified person is dangerous. Being associated with a person who has become an enemy of the state is dangerous. Being associated with Jesus who is in conflict with the traditions and expectations of our mothers and fathers, our employers, or even the academy, is dangerous. Being associated with One who promotes our kinship with the poor, the foreigner, and the socially unacceptable, is dangerous. How embarrassing! Jesus shows me however, that making decisions ruled by the desire to avoid embarrassment and the possible exclusion from the circles of humanity is faulty calculus. A greater factor remains and that is the coming of the Son of Man, Jesus, in all His glory, and in the glory of the Father and His angels. A greater factor is the evidence of God’s rule and reign over all yet to be seen not only in the transfiguration of Jesus but in His glorification through the Cross and His resurrection, and His return to make all things new. I need not be embarrassed of the One who has defeated death. I need to embrace Him. 

Daniel Bourguet on Jesus Speaking Tenderly

In my formation as a follower of Jesus memorizing Scripture has been important. After John 3:16 came Luke 9:23. But I wonder if I have abused the text and in doing so may have created a distorted vision of Jesus and therefore “abused” those entrusted to the care and discipleship of the Church. Through Daniel Bourguet’s meditations on John 13-16, The Last Words of Jesus Before the Cross, I have a new appreciation for the tender consideration Jesus had toward his disciples. Jesus has open hands toward them. Not a hand open and moving toward them in anger, but a hand that is open both letting go and receiving them all at once. Jesus respected people and thus offered His radical acceptance of them.

Bourquet notes that the only direct address of His disciples in John 13-16 is when Jesus calls them “little children.” Jesus is speaking to “little children” that could be translated “my little baby ones.” This is astonishing Jesus has spoken to grown men and women all along. But in the upper room just before the Cross Jesus is giving birth to the Church. They had no past, only a future as His children. The use of the diminutive form of child, little children is rare. And in the other occasions of it in the New Testament it is accompanied with the possessive “my.” But in John, Jesus does not use it. Bourget writes,

It is therefore as if Jesus is saying, “my little children”. All the same, it is worth noting that in abstaining from adding the possessive Jesus was the first to do so since the inter-testamental texts, whatever their date, each use the possessive. Why this innovation? It is a gentle way of not putting his hand on those he loves, of avoiding appropriating them; more, it allows a certain ambiguity, leaving the disciples to understand they were both his little children and children of God the Father.

That they were children of God the Father is not open to doubt; the very idea of “Father” implies that they are children. That they were also Jesus’ little children is evident when later he refers to them as his orphans: “I will not leave you orphans” (14:18). The word “orphan” is very lovely, full of delicacy and respect for the disciples, indicating that Jesus would die and so leave them orphaned, but without using the brutal word “death.” The implication is both clear and yet tactfully unstated.

“Little children”: this puts Jesus in the position of father, not biologically of course, but spiritually. He shows us the way of genuine spiritual paternity, not arrogating to himself the title of father, which he systematically reserves for God, the one true Father, before whom he always locates Himself as Son. Using the term “little children” rather than “my little children” indicates his wish not to have any hold over his disciples, but without abdicating his responsibility as a spiritual father. The whole of the discourse in fact demonstrates his concern for his children, to comfort, strengthen, teach and build them up in love. He reveals himself as the perfect model of a spiritual father, to the point of giving his life for them…

A spiritual father can say, “my little children” with such love that the voice of the Father can be heard; this is someone whose whole being speaks of the Father, their whole life, their love, their compassion, mercy and humility, their willingness to listen, their patience and perseverance, their expectations and their forbearance, everything about them speaks of the Father; this is a person sufficiently transparent for the Father to be seen through them, to the point it can be said, “When I see this person, I see the Father.”

In giving his disciples to understand that they are the Father’s little children, Jesus reveals God’s fatherly love, the affectionate love of the Father so full of tenderness for his little children. This is surely a real revelation; never in fact had God used the words “little children” to speak to anyone! Our familiar diminutive teknion is entirely absent from the Septuagint, while the normal teknon is found more than three hundred times. The Septuagint had no place for the affectionate diminutive, and never suggested that God might be so tender and affectionate with his children. The three inter-testamental texts that do use the word never connect it with God, so Jesus was absolutely introducing an innovation, the first to reveal the paternal tenderness of God, very wonderfully.

Jesus therefore becomes the revealer of the Father’s tenderness, as indeed he had earlier that same day by washing the disciples’ feet, just like a mother who washes the feet of her little children who are too young to wash themselves. What a joy it is for us to know ourselves loved by Jesus and by a Father who is so affectionate that we might even think of him as maternal. 

Reader friend, if we wish to really make this text our own, we need to take on board the fact that we are considered by Jesus to be little children, his own little children, as well as the little children of God our Father; this is not necessarily obvious!

Daniel Bourguet, The Last Words of Jesus Before the Cross: Meditations on John 13-16, p 6-8. The People’s Seminary Press 2020; translated from original French edition first published in 2019, Le dernier entretien avant la croix.

A Pastor Speaking Tenderly 

Now, when I read the words of Jesus in Luke 9:23, “Whoever wants to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” I hear the tender persistent voice of Jesus.

Now when I read the “classic words of discipleship” from Jesus here and in Luke 14:26, 27, and 33 I cannot hear these words from the mouth of a demanding king. Rather these are the tender life giving words of radical acceptance coming from my true spiritual father seeking to gently persuade us to relinquish false recipes for life and the idols that have captivated us in order to fully and freely follow Jesus and therefore LIVE!

Now I must wield these words of discipleship with caution. These are not to be spoken over another because they would not follow my plan. Rather they must be offered in the tenderness and generosity of Jesus when the struggles of the heart have been heard. Since I cannot know what is in the heart of another person I must first offer myself, probe, and listen. Perhaps I should only offer these words of Jesus when I hear one of these three struggles:

I want to be Jesus’ disciple but I also want to save myself from some “deathly” fate.
I want to be with Jesus but I also want to gain the world.
I want to see Jesus’ Kingdom but I also want to avoid being embarrassed before the people whose opinion and applause matters to me today.

And when I offer these words of Jesus, I must do so without resentment but with tenderness, without bravado but with surrender, without seeking to control but with love’s freedom. This is how Jesus spoke these words to His disciples who may have been stunned to contemplate where Jesus was taking them. This is how Jesus has spoken to me.