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.
Family, of all created reality, is meant to be that which we most love. And yet it must still be secondary to God's call and Jesus' claim on our hearts. We know that family can be an obstacle to following Jesus in ways that range from mere delays ("I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home" (see Luke 9:61)) to outright hostility ("Brothers will turn against their own brothers and hand them over to be killed. Fathers will hand over their own children to be killed. Children will fight against their own parents and will have them killed" (see Matthew 10:21)). Our priorities must be clear in our minds ahead of time so that if the time comes when we are ever forced to choose we may then choose wisely. Yet even when we choose Jesus over family it is still the case that we continue to love our family, if not as they would have us love them, at least to their true good and final end in God himself. That fact does not necessarily make it feel any easier, or make it any less of a cross which we must carry.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion?
The idea is that we must have the resolve to not turn back even if the cost begins to seem very high. There is doubtless a period of heady optimism at the beginning of a construction project such as this, an initial fervor that makes us ready to regard all sacrifices as trivial. But as the project continues, seemingly without end, and the cost accumulates, do we maintain this initially cheery disposition? If we jump in with the assumption that everything will always seem easy we may be tempted to give up when we do encounter difficulty. But if we truly assess the undertaking correctly at the beginning we will understand that the cost Jesus is asking of us is in fact our entire lives. This is a price that cannot be paid by the selfish ego. Only grace at work in our hearts, joining us to the sacrifice of the cross of Christ, can finally allow us to fully surrender the entire cost of discipleship.
Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?
We march into a battle that will often seem, from a worldly perspective to be nearly lost. We build a tower but we already hear the world laughing and telling us that it is impossible. But if we understand that these are metaphors for carrying our cross we will be prepared to lose in the eyes of the world, and to be laughed at, as long as we remain with Jesus as his disciples. The signs that seem to us to be failure are often just ego fear about the dying to self that the cross of Christ is meant to bring about in us. When we recognize these as signs of that death we will correctly interpret them as also signs of our own resurrection and we will persevere.
In the same way,
everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple.
Not only our material goods, but even our self possession must be submitted to the Lordship of Christ. But what he wants of us, what his reign in us is meant to accomplish, is not the suffering or difficulties that we do invariably encounter along the way. His desire is to reshape our hearts to make them like his own loving heart. He desires that the seed die, but only so that it may give life.
Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another;
for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
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