The High Cost of Following

A Reflection on Discipleship, Saints, and the Rest of Us

Last Sunday, Deacon Jess offered an observation during his sermon that has lingered with me all week. He spoke of what he jokingly called the “two Jesuses” we encounter in the Gospels.

There is the Jesus who heals the sick, welcomes the outcast, comforts the grieving, and gathers the lost sheep into his arms. This is the Jesus we love to preach about and, if we are honest, the Jesus we love to encounter. He is compassionate, merciful, patient, and kind.

Then there is the other Jesus. The Jesus who tells a rich young ruler to sell everything he owns. The Jesus who sends disciples into strange places with no money, no luggage, and no spare clothes. The Jesus who tells people to let the dead bury their own dead. The Jesus who repeatedly says, “Take up your cross and follow me.” The Jesus who seems intent on walking directly toward suffering, rejection, and death—and who invites others to come with him.

As Christians, particularly those of us who enjoy theological nuance and historical context, we can be tempted to explain away these difficult passages. We might suggest Jesus was being hyperbolic. Perhaps he was making a rhetorical point. Maybe this command was only for a specific audience in a specific moment.

I have preached a few of those sermons myself.

But the older I get, the less convinced I am that Jesus didn’t mean what he said.

I think he did.

I think Jesus genuinely intends for his followers to be willing to sacrifice. I think he intends for us to place him above possessions, status, comfort, security, and even the relationships we hold most dear. I think he intends for us to walk the cruciform path—the way of the cross—which is ultimately the way of self-giving love. The challenge, of course, is that very few people actually do it.

When I read through the Gospels, I can think of only a handful who hear Jesus’ radical invitation and respond with complete abandon. Peter drops his nets. James and John leave the family business. Matthew rises from the tax booth. The apostles leave behind the lives they knew and follow Jesus into uncertainty.

They are the elite among the disciples. Not better than the rest of us, but certainly unusual. And perhaps that is the point.

For every apostle who left everything, there were countless others who heard Jesus speak and then returned home. They still had children to raise, aging parents to care for, fields to tend, businesses to run, and communities to serve. They could not imagine leaving everything behind.

Yet they did not leave unchanged. They carried the story home. Someone had to tell their children what they had seen. Someone had to gather around tables and recount the parables. Someone had to welcome traveling apostles into their homes. Someone had to feed the poor, care for widows, encourage the discouraged, and preserve the faith for the next generation. Someone had to keep the fire burning.

If we are honest, most of us live somewhere in that second group.

We hear the radical call of Jesus. We acknowledge its truth. We do not dismiss it. We do not explain it away. We hold it before us as a shining standard of what complete discipleship looks like. And then, imperfectly, we spend our lives walking toward it.

The star that guided the Magi to Bethlehem was never meant to be possessed. It was meant to be followed. Perhaps the saints function in much the same way.

The apostles. The martyrs. Francis. Teresa. Martin. Romero. They stand before us as bright witnesses to what a life wholly surrendered to Christ can become. Their lives remind us that Jesus meant every word he said.

Yet their witness is not intended to shame us. It is intended to orient us.

The vast majority of Christians will never abandon everything and become missionaries. Most of us will not die for the faith. Most of us will not become saints whose names are remembered centuries later.

Instead, we will tell the story.

We will tell it around dinner tables and hospital bedsides. We will tell it in Bible studies and Sunday school classrooms. We will tell it through acts of generosity, forgiveness, service, and love. We will tell it by caring for neighbors, raising children, serving communities, and striving, however imperfectly, to reflect Christ in the places where God has planted us.

The high call of discipleship remains exactly what Jesus says it is.

The cross is still heavy.

The road to Jerusalem is still long.

The cost is still real.

But thanks be to God, there is room on that road not only for apostles and martyrs, but also for ordinary disciples who keep walking, keep striving, and keep telling the story.

And perhaps that, too, is a holy calling.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben