NOTES for Luk 14:25-35

To know the will of God, the gift of wisdom is necessary, but so is our effort in using that gift. The Holy Spirit who has been sent down gives us the ability to determine the costs and calculate our strength, but we ourselves must do this. At the same time, Jesus also points to the right result of such a calculation: our strength will be enough precisely to give up everything, take up the cross, and follow Him.

Jesus often connects the path into the Kingdom with a kind of evaluation, calculation, and analysis of a person's possibilities. The one who is going to begin building must first assess his resources and understand whether they will be enough to complete the work; if not, it is better not to begin. Such an attitude is just in any case when the issue is a spiritual path.

Indeed, when setting out on a road, we always hope to reach the goal and always try to understand how difficult or dangerous the road may prove to be, and whether it will be within our strength at all. And if what has been said is true of every spiritual path, it is especially true when the matter concerns the Christian path: here the issue is the Kingdom, the path into which is harder than any other even though the Savior Himself constantly accompanies us on this path. Of course, if Christianity were simply one more new religion, the situation would be different. Every religion is, to a certain extent, a goal in itself.

And even if the issue is something greater than itself, every religious person can always comfort himself by saying that even if he has not reached that greater thing, he has at least done something, and what he has done is valuable in itself. Usually in such cases a religious person tells himself and others that he did what he could and never counted on more: after all, he is not a saint or a righteous man, but an ordinary person. But that is precisely the point: Christianity as a religion has no meaning at all.

Christianity is the path into the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom, and the only goal of a Christian can be the Kingdom in all its fullness; otherwise it is not worth beginning. This is what Jesus speaks about, giving as an example the owner's plan to build a watchtower in his garden. An unfinished or poorly built tower is not only useless; it can even harm by creating for its builder the illusion of safety where there is none. Then it is better not to build anything at all.

So also a Christian who has not reached the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness may fall into a trap: it may seem to him that everything is in order with his spiritual life because he fulfills certain "religious duties of a Christian," while in fact he is no closer to the Kingdom than anyone else who never thinks about religion at all. This maximum, this reaching of the goal, is what Jesus sets before His listeners, calling them to consider whether they are ready to go to the end, and if not, whether it would not be better for them to leave Him and live their ordinary life, the one they lived before.

This thought is repeated in the Gospel many times in different forms. What is going on? Why does the Lord consider it so important? Perhaps because He sees that our desire "to have" carries a deeply sinful nature. It is the desire to secure the foundation of our selfhood, our independence from God and from one another, the desire to reinforce our pride and our exaltation over others, over those who "do not have." But God's design is a universe founded on love, that is, on mutual connection, mutual dependence, and mutual self-giving. Jesus is not saying here that we should have nothing. He calls us to "renounce," not to attach too much importance to what we have, not to consider our property any kind of serious support in our life, but to place all our hope, all our trust, only in God.

The Gospel gives us such an example. People always try to set something aside "for a rainy day"; for older people it is generally common to save for their own funeral. And the Gospel tells us about one such elderly, respected man who had taken care in advance of his future burial and prepared an expensive tomb for himself... Then he met Jesus and began to consider himself His disciple, a secret disciple, because he feared the opinion of the religious authorities. But then Jesus dies on the cross, and this man, Joseph of Arimathea, loses his fear. He goes to Pilate and obtains permission from him to bury the Lord. By giving Jesus his tomb, he renounces what he has, the human basis for hope in the respect of others and in a dignified end to life, and at that moment he stops being Christ's "secret" disciple and becomes His real disciple.

We have all learned and continue to learn. But what do we mean by that word? As a rule, it means that someone tells us something and we listen. At best, someone shows us something and we watch. That is the classroom model. Jesus proposes something completely different: He calls His disciples to follow Him, to share His life, to learn in the course of that life, and to strive to become like their Teacher.

And here it is worth considering how Jesus Himself lives and precisely what aspects of His life His disciples should model their own lives on: He is no longer a carpenter; He has no permanent home (we need only recall the words: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” — Mt 8:20); He has no money, no family... He Himself gave up everything in order to serve everyone.

And what do we expect when we think of ourselves as His disciples? Are we not repeating the mistake of the sons of Zebedee, who were “dividing up cabinet posts” in the future Kingdom (Mk 10:35-37)?

The Kingdom of God comes into this world, but a person must take a step toward it, for it is like a wedding feast to which everyone is invited, but not everyone wants to come. Very much depends on this step; that is why Christ speaks of it in such serious words. He may require everything from a person, even to the point of forgetting himself for the sake of the Kingdom. In order to take this step, the Good News must become more important than the things most important to a person: home, household, family, confidence in the future. (The Aramaic pair "love-hate" here simply means "prefer.")

But a serious step requires a serious decision, perhaps even more serious than the decision of the king or the tower builder in these parables. Christ wants trust, but He does not require madness: a person must soberly "calculate" whether the Gospel is truly more precious to him than all the rest of life, and if so, step toward it.

Today's parable of the wedding feast directly concerns the question of life, joy, and love. After all, we all strive for these things. We all need them. But one fine day, or more often than that, we face a choice: where should we seek life and joy? We can begin to build our own life and our own happiness, whether family happiness or some other kind. Or we can go to the wedding feast, a constant Gospel image of Christ's Kingdom. The choice is entirely free.