Assessing the Cost of Being Christian - 09.04.22 (23rd Sunday OT- C)
“Assessing the Cost of Being Christian”
By: Fr. David Schmidt
St. Pope John Paul II Shrine (Washington, DC)
Mass Readings - https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090422.cfm
In today’s Gospel, Jesus lays out the requirements for us on what it means to be His disciple. There are many people today who say that they are Christian, but they don’t understand what it actually means to be Christian. They don’t understand what Christ is asking of His followers. The Christianity that many people live out is one that is based on their own terms and their own definition of what it means to be a Christian. However, what Christ asks of His followers is something much more demanding than what many believe. We use the term Christian too lightly and too casually, not really knowing what it entails. If we are going to call ourselves Christian, if we are going to call ourselves followers of Christ, then we need to understand the cost and commitment of what is required of us as professed Christians.
The Lord gives us two great images on the importance of counting the cost before taking on certain endeavors. He gives us the image of people building a tower and how they sit down beforehand to calculate the cost of what it is going to take to build this tower. If they don’t do this, they will only lay the foundation and not be able to finish the tower thus looking like fools as everyone will laugh at them and say, “This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.”
Jesus then gives another image of a king marching into battle, and how he first sits down to assess whether his 10,000 troops can defeat the 20,000 opposing troops. If he doesn’t think he can, then while he is still far away, he negotiates peace terms. If the king didn’t assess this situation properly, he would’ve gone into battle and been easily defeated looking like a fool in the process.
Jesus uses these examples as a warning to us that if we don’t sit down and properly assess what it means to be Christian and what it is going to cost to be His disciple, then we run the risk of calling ourselves Christian our whole lives, but looking like fools in the end, as we fall short and don’t make it into heaven because we didn’t assess properly what Christ was asking of us.
So what is the cost to be a disciple of Jesus? What is He requiring of His followers?
First, Jesus says “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” When first hearing this, we might think that Jesus is being harsh. We might think to ourselves, “Does Jesus really want me to hate my family and loved ones? Is that what it means to be Christian? I thought we were called to love everyone, and not hate.”
What Jesus means by this is not that He wants us to actually hate our family and loved ones, but that He doesn’t want us putting anyone or anything in this life above Him. Christ is meant to be first in our lives. He is to be our top priority. Christ is always meant to reign supreme and sit on the throne of our heart. We are not meant to value this life more than our life with God in heaven forever. God must be first. He must be our everything.
What’s interesting is that by putting God first in our lives, over and above our family and loved ones, it actually enables us to love our family and friends more. This is because we are not capable of loving without God. When He is first in our lives we are more open to His love, and He pours His love onto us which we then pour out onto our family and friends enabling us to love them more deeply. If we put our family and friends before God, it will severely limit our love for them because we won’t be loving them in proper order.
When God is first in our lives we are also able to enjoy this world the way God intended us too. The world is good because God made it. He not only made it, but He made it out of love as a gift to us. He wants us to enjoy and appreciate the world as a little child enjoys playing on a playground. He wants us to see how everything in this world reveals Him in some way, and how it is meant to point us back to Him. This life is meant to point us to heaven. The issue that many people fall into is that they begin to love the things of this world so much that they begin to love them more than God. When we begin to value this life over the next, we stop pursuing heaven, and that which we stop pursuing we don’t attain.
The second cost of being Christ’s disciple is that we must pick up our cross and follow Him. Many people interpret this as meaning that the cross in this scenario stands for the difficulties in our lives that come our way, and we need to carry this cross as part of the Christian journey. This is true, but it is even more radical than that.
To the 1st century Jew, picking up your cross and carrying it had a more intense meaning. The Jews at the time were used to seeing those who were condemned criminals having to literally carry their cross to the place where they would be crucified. Crucifixion was specifically for those who had rebelled against authority. This act of the condemned criminal carrying their cross to their crucifixion was an act that showed complete submission to the authority that they had rebelled against.
In Christ’s call for us to carry our cross and follow Him, it is a call to recognize that we are condemned criminals in our sin, and that we must carry our cross and follow Christ in complete submission to Him whom we have rebelled against. We are to follow the witness of Christ, who also carried His Cross to Calvary, taking on our punishment as an innocent man, as He was crucified on the Cross for our sins. We are called to carry our cross and die with Christ, so that we can also share in the abundant life that He wishes to give us that comes from sharing in His death.
Finally, He tells us that in order to be His disciple we must renounce all of our possessions. Now, this doesn’t mean that we have to go home right now and sell everything that we have in order to be followers of Christ. It means that Jesus is calling us to not be attached to anything that we possess. We have to be willing to give up anything that we own if God asks us too. It means that we need to be generous with what we have. It also means there might be situations where God is going to ask us to sacrifice a lot. Some might be called to literally give up everything to follow God into religious life or to be a missionary. Some might be in situations where they have to sacrifice their job or their career in order to uphold their Christian values especially if the company is asking them to do something that goes against what we believe.
The question we need to ask ourselves is- ‘Are we willing to make any sacrifice that God calls us to make no matter the cost?’
As I said, it is not easy being Christian. The Christian life is demanding. We need to be careful to not call ourselves Christians in too causal of a way. If we are going to call ourselves Christian, then we must really assess the cost of what it means to follow Christ. Otherwise, we will look like fools in the end, as we will fall severely short of what Christ is calling us too, thus falling short of the heavenly kingdom.
Yes, the cost of being a disciple and follower of Jesus Christ is a high one. However, we must never forget that it is also a joyful one. God will give us His grace to live the Christian life that He is calling us to live. He will help us live it with joy and love. Because even though the cost to be a Christian is a steep one, the reward that God has in store for those who persevere to the end is far greater than anything we can ever imagine. Heaven is worth the cost. Jesus Christ is worth the cost. So let us first calculate the cost, then with great courage and trust, let us put Christ first in our lives, carry our cross, and give up anything that He asks of us, and then follow Him with our whole heart, so that we might receive our eternal reward.
