URC Daily Devotion 30th March 2019

In a few places in the Gospels we are told about the large crowds that followed Jesus and gathered around him as he taught.  Here is one of those moments. Jesus didn’t want a bunch of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ admirers to be his disciples. True discipleship demanded more than just an eager following, and so Jesus lays it on thick, perhaps a little too thick for some.  As one person has written, rather than a message to comfort the disturbed, these challenging words of Jesus are more likely to disturb the comfortable.

In many of our churches we don’t have the same luxury that Jesus had – that of having the opportunity to challenge large crowds of would-be followers to understand the true cost of discipleship.  And even if we did, we’re hardly likely to get very far by telling our spiritual seekers to turn their backs on their families and give up all their possessions! If we said it at all it would be saved until the later sessions of the Discipleship Development course which we hope will bring people closer to Christ.

So that is why we must allow this passage, and others like it that contain those hard sayings of Jesus, the things that perhaps we wish he’d never said, to challenge and disturb us.  What then should we do? In some senses only we can answer that. If we have ears to listen, we can examine ourselves, our motives, our priorities, the things that distract us. We can ask where our commitment really lies.  As disciples of Jesus do we still offer to the world the distinctive savour, the healing presence, the ice-melting properties of salt? Do our lives of discipleship make a difference?