Sore Thumbs and Barring our Cross Following Christ / Luke 14:25–35 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday September 7th 2025 / Season of Pentecost / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday September 7th 2025: Season of Pentecost / Luke 14:25–35 “Sore Thumbs and Barring our Cross Following Christ”

Now great crowds accompanied [Jesus], and He turned and said to them, “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. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be My disciple.

“Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends there is a passage that sticks out like a sore thumb in our Gospel Reading today: It’s the part where Jesus says — by our modern estimation — a very ‘un-Jesus-y’ and challenging sort of thing, “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.” Here many people will say, ‘hang on there Jesus, isn’t that a bit harsh!’ Your Bible will have a heading like The Cost of Discipleship before this section and a person may say, ‘well that is a cost that is too high for me.’ Dear ones this doesn’t come out of left field: Jesus has been teaching this to His disciples and those gathered around Him consistently through His public ministry and it’s not disconnected with what He says immediately after this when He says “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” The one is not disconnected from the other.

So first let’s see how Jesus previously taught about this earlier in the Gospel of Saint Luke. Back in chapter eight not long after Jesus had publicly taught The Parable of the Sower, and the other one about not hiding the light of your Lamp to the darkness of the World, Saint Luke tells us how Jesus’ “mother and His brothers came to Him, but they could not reach Him because of the crowd. And [Jesus] was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see You.” But [Jesus] answered them, “My mother and My brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”[1] And so Jesus was teaching that being part of the Kingdom of God is more than being part of a biological family and being part of God the Father’s family is grounded in personally hearing God’s Word and doing what God’s Word says in your life.

Then after feeding the five thousand and after Saint Peter makes his Confession of faith that Jesus is “The Christ of God,”[2] and Jesus responds by teaching them how He as the “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised,” having come down from the Mount of Transfiguration with His face unwaveringly set like flint toward Jerusalem, Saint Luke tells us that as they were walking along the road someone said to [Jesus] “I will follow You wherever You go,” [to which Jesus responds], “foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” [And] To another [Saint Luke tells us, Jesus] said, “Follow Me.” But [the man replied], “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Yet another said [to Jesus], “I will follow You, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”[3] This Christ of God that Saint Peter confessed was not shy about making the obvious plain to people who were limping along with two minds regarding their dedication to God. Over and over again Jesus says to people ‘paint or get off the ladder.’ For anyone who wants things to be easy this is all very hard. Jesus is repeatedly teaching that there are no special considerations that are to be counted as more important; there are no relationships that are permitted to hold a place over and above the place God holds in your life. And while Jesus teaches us to love our neighbour — which includes family —  Jesus is not allowing such love to hold a greater place in a person’s heart than their love of God. “God is love” and all true love flows from Him, there is to be no other love counted as greater or more pre-eminent “whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him,” [as Christians we] have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us,”[4] a love manifested not in our politicians, not in our celebrities, not in our intellectual academics, not in even in our friends and family but rather manifested in Christ Jesus. This is what Jesus was teaching all who would hear Him, this is what He was teaching His disciples and this is what He is teaching you today. Following Jesus requires and creates changes in your life, changes that include changes to your past relationships, opportunities to reconsider these relationships: we saw this in our Epistle reading from the Letter to Philemon where Saint Paul the writer and spiritual father, the runaway slave Onesimus and his former owner Philemon who, have no biological connection to each other, yet in Christ Jesus have entered into new relationships with one other where the former things have passed away and in its place a new brotherhood under God emerges which supersedes the former.[5]

Teaching of His coming crucifixion, suffering and death upon the cross Jesus in the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke says, “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is My distress until it is accomplished!” and then Jesus asks, “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”[6] Dear ones even the heavens themselves are divided in this way, a third of the angels fell in rebellion and two thirds remained faithful; with poetic language Saint John relates his vision of this in the Book of Revelation when he writes how the dragon Satan’s “tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it.”[7] And so we see a division even among the angels of heaven centered on the person of Christ Jesus and His incarnation, His coming to us in the flesh.

Jesus is consistent in what He teaches He knows that His cross will divide and that those division lines may even sadly run through families. When Jesus in the Gospel of Saint John, the very night before He would physically bear His cross in order to suffer and die, says to His disciples in private, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me,” He is teaching them about this cosmic and now eternal dividing line which is centred squarely in Him.

Now when there is only one way of doing something that one way will stick out like a sore thumb. It simply becomes the unavoidable truth of the matter. When, by the grace of God, you are walking down the golden streets of heaven you will never in all of your eternal life bump into someone who got there by following the eightfold path of the Buddha; you will never strike up a conversation with someone who got there climbing the seven step Masonic Ladder of Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, Justice, Faith, Hope, and Charity; you will never find anyone who entered heaven as a result of having successfully completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca or by submitting to any of the other five pillars of Islam to appease Allah. There is every other way and then there is The Way, who is Christ Jesus. There is every other relationship seeking to be first in your life and then there is the love of God for you in Christ above it all. Therefore it is not impossible, even within our own families and among our own friends and acquaintances and associations to have such divisions; Jesus for His part is begin honest about this.

In the Gospel of Saint Matthew Jesus teaches the same thing again however in a slightly more gentle way when He says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”[8] 

Jesus calls us to follow Him in this way and yet it is good to remember that Jesus Himself was faithful to His heavenly Father, and He unlike you and I, this Jesus was able to do this faultlessly without sin. And so Jesus says, “I have not spoken on My own authority, but the Father who sent Me has Himself given Me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that His commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told Me.”[9] All through the Gospel of Saint John you will find such statements, Jesus even says of Himself and His heavenly Father, “I and the Father are one,”[10] which means there is no division between them, no sword to cleave one from the other, no difference of opinion, no parting of the ways between them. Jesus faced every temptation to be divided from His heavenly Father without sin, thereby providing forgiveness for you when you struggle due to the sad divisions you face in your families.

Just think when Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy from our Old Testament Reading today writes for our instruction these words about following the Commandments “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in His ways, and by keeping His commandments and His statutes and His rules, then you shall live and multiply,”[11] it is Jesus who does this without fault never letting sin drive a wedge between Him and His heavenly Father and only being divide in death from His heavenly Father when Christ upon the cross takes our sins upon Himself so those sins can ultimately be divide away from us on account of His righteousness and His active love being exchanged for them. With this Jesus cements the new relationship we have with Him and His heavenly Father and with each other in His precious shed blood.

For some of you the majority of people in your family will be believers in the one true faith, the Christian faith, and you will only have one or two family members who do not believe and who as a result stick out like a sore thumb. For others you will be the only one who is a Christian in a family full of unbelievers and it will be you who on account of your faith in Jesus sticks out like a sore thumb to them. Or maybe it’s a wild mixed bag!  Whichever way it goes the thing to remember here is the honest appraisal of the situation. Maybe it’s not in the family but it’s at work or with friends. You have had a bible at your desk at work, you’ve worn a cross, or maybe you have Christian artwork up on the walls in your home. When you stop and think about it you know what this is like, you’ve experienced it in some way, this sticking out. For some of you it will even be a rather bitter cross to bear.

Even before the wood of the beams of the cross of His crucifixion was laid upon His bruised and bloodied back Jesus had been bearing this cross of division ... not division within the Holy Trinity but with His family as we heard regarding His brothers, some of whom could not see the truth of who He was. He had been likewise publicly carrying the cross of division between Him and the Pharisees, between Him and the Sadducees. Jesus who was life and light, who was the Good Salt that seasons everything that He ever came in contact with endured people walking away from Him, endured people who refused to follow Him,[12] endured people who only wanted Him for His miracles and not His teaching,[13] and would even endure betrayal and abandonment and denials from His handpicked disciples.[14] He carried this cross from before His birth as we heard concerning the fallen angels and He carried this cross from His birth when in His early years He faced the threat of death from a jealousy and paranoid King Herod the Great.[15] With His own two eyes He saw men pick up stones to murder Him when they realised that Jesus was teaching them that He was God in the flesh,[16] He had the people of His own hometown drag Him up to the top of a cliff to cast Him down to His death for publicly teaching that the God was fulfilling the promises of the Old Testament in Him.[17] In all of this Jesus bears the cross without sin and so when He says to you “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple,” He doesn’t say those words without having suffered it all Himself first. He knows how hard the task is. He knows the pain of it. He is there to help you with the load.

Later in the Gospel of Saint Luke as Jesus bears His cross to Golgotha He experienced a small mercy when  “as they led Him away [to His crucifixion, the Roman soldiers] seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus.”[18] As Simon of Cyrene provided help to Christ Jesus under His burden so to Jesus will care for you, trust in Him when the cross you bear is heavy and you can barely make one more step under its crushing load. This same Jesus is the one who says to you of Himself, “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. Come to Me, all who labour and are heavy laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me,” Jesus says, “for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.”[19]

In these days pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit, that we may grow daily to love what is good and obey God’s command cheerfully even when it makes us stick out like a sore thumb to the World; and as we are kept from an easy faith that costs us nothing, that we would be preserved as the salt of the earth and light in the darkness of a World that does not know God; remembering always that God does indeed know us and our challenges in this life and we are now His and that being His means that we have the promise that nothing will dived us from Him, as Saint Paul confesses, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[20] Amen.    

Let us pray:  Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Luke 8:19–21
[2] Luke 9:20
[3] Luke 9:57–62
[4] 1 John 4:16
[5] Philemon: 1–22
[6] Luke 12:49–53
[7] Revelation 12:4
[8] Matthew 10:34–39
[9] John 12:49–50
[10] John 10:30
[11] Deuteronomy 30:15–16a
[12] John 6:60-69
[13] John 6:1-15
[14] Matthew 26:14-16; 47-56 & Mark 14:10-11; 26-31; 43-50 & John 18:15-18, 25-27
[15] Matthew 2:1-18
[16] John 8:59 & John 10:31
[17] Luke 4:16-30
[18] Luke 23:26
[19] Matthew 11:27–30
[20] Romans 8:38–39

Photo Credit: Main Photo adaptation of Tumb Clip Art by Pr. Ted Giese from openclipart.org.