“Take up thy Cross, the Saviour said, If thou wouldst my disciple be. Deny thyself, the world forsake, And humbly follow after me.”
This Victorian hymn is often sung during Lent, a season when the Church has traditionally preached on readings about the cost of discipleship, and emphasised the four great requirements of the spiritual life: penitence, prayer, fasting and alms giving.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus suggests that the cost of following him can be very great and no-one should undertake this path without first calculating this cost.
It is not really fashionable these days to dwell too much on the cost of discipleship, and I have to admit that when parents bring babies to us for baptism, we seldom ask whether they have sat down and counted the cost of what it will mean for their child to follow Christ.
Many modern Christian preachers and teachers rightly emphasise the love and the forgiveness of God, but seem to some extent to skate over the question of penitence and self-denial which forms much of the teaching of Lent.
The strong message of the all-encompassing fatherly love of God, which is indeed the message of much of Jesus’ teaching, may be emphasised these days to counter the stern and disciplinary image of God held by many Victorians.
I often reflect with horror on the film version of the musical Oliver, in which the starving orphans are fed inadequate mouthfuls of gruel underneath a large sign which states, “God is Love”.
Whilst Christian philanthropists may have understood the donations they made to the building and maintaining of orphanages and poorhouses to be their contribution to almsgiving and the material cost of their discipleship made in response to the love of God, the message reaching the children must have been different.
Today, perhaps in compensation for such apparent lack of sensitivity in our forebears, the Church of England has sought to explain the penitential season of Lent to children by means of the Live Life, Love Lent campaign.
In this, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ask us all, both adults and children, to reach out with one simple act of kindness or generosity each day throughout Lent, whether to our friends, our families, those in the local community, those suffering overseas, or in environmental work.
In this way, they say, “We show God’s love to others.” “With God’s help, we can change the world for good a little bit every day. Together we can build better and more generous communities. Together we can lighten our load on the planet.”
Such teaching is vital to build love and compassion, kindness and gratitude amongst the members of the Body of Christ, and also to reach out into a world which sometimes seems to lack some of these virtues.
When we contemplate the tragedies and the conflicts which seem so stark around us at the moment, such individual acts of compassion may provide the initial steps necessary to re-build the goodness of God’s creation in our troubled world.
We can attempt to reflect in our actions towards others much more effectively than the Victorian orphanage the statement, “God is love”.
But it might seem to some to reduce the impact of passages in the Bible like this evening’s Gospel reading, which suggest that there are great costs to discipleship.
The example Jesus gives seems to be that in order to follow him we should hate all those dearest to us and even our own life.
Such a statement sits extremely uncomfortably with modern sensitivities, as they no doubt did with those of his original listeners.
We could first of all perhaps say that in Jewish writing, “hating” is often a way of expressing simply “not loving”.
Thus early translations of the story of Jacob’s wives, Rachel and Leah, in the Old Testament suggest that Rachel was loved and Leah was “hated”, but more modern translations simply tell us that Leah was “neglected”.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the version of what Jesus is saying is expressed slightly differently.
Here Jesus states, “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
The emphasis here is on the love of God above and before all.
Perhaps what Jesus is actually saying is that we are not to get so involved with the material and emotional wellbeing of our loved ones that we forget to put God first, and the needy for whom he especially cares on earth.
In the family-orientated situation of 1st-century Galilee, to put the needs of others before those of your own family, might well have been construed as hating your relatives, and it is equally counter-cultural today.
For us, then, perhaps Lent can be a time when we look penitently deep into ourselves, but also look outwards to see what our commitment to Christ calls us to do to serve God and his suffering world.
We are often reminded that it is better to fast in secret than to make a big deal of it.
We might also remember that true fasting and acts of penitence involve helping those unable to help themselves, and here lies the cost of discipleship which might need counting before we set off on the Christian journey.
We are called to put God, and the needs of his creation before our own needs or sometimes even before those of our nearest and dearest.
We are called to serve others and to use our time and resources, perhaps especially in the penitential season of Lent, to make a difference to the world we live in; to lay aside our prejudices and criticisms and to reach out with God’s love.
This may involve a cost we have not anticipated and a willingness to put ourselves, our concerns and our needs last, but as we reflect during Lent, we might consider whether this is what Christ means when he says, “Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
I was recently given an anthology of readings for the Church Year, and discovered a wonderful poem by Robert Herrick in the 17th century entitled “To Keep a True Lent”.
Herrick too reminds us that keeping Lent is not about looking miserable whilst we fast “with downcast look and sowre.”
Rather, it is to take the opportunity to reach out and help those who are less fortunate, and to give up conflict, dislike and what he terms “old debate”.
Is this a Fast, to keep the Larder leane and cleane from fat of Veales and Sheep?
Is it to quit the dish of Flesh, yet still to fill the platter high with Fish?
Is it to faste an houre, or ragg’d to go, or show a downcast look and sowre?
No, tis a Fast, to dole thy sheaf of wheat and meat unto the hungry Soule.
It is to fast from strife, from old debate and hate; to circumcise thy life.
To shew a heart grief-rent ; to starve thy sin, not Bin; and that’s to keep thy Lent.