The Terrible Cost of Not Following Jesus Text: Luke 9:57-62
Introduction: The Terms of Surrender
We live in an age of soft-focus, consumer-friendly Christianity. The modern evangelical enterprise has spent the better part of a century trying to market Jesus as a product that will enhance your life with minimal disruption. He is presented as a helpful addition, a spiritual supplement, a way to become a better, more fulfilled version of yourself. The call of the gospel has been sanded down into a polite invitation to a self-improvement seminar. Come to Jesus, and He will fix your marriage, tidy up your finances, and give you a sense of purpose, all for the low, low price of a sinner's prayer and a weekly hour in a comfortable chair.
But the Jesus we meet on the road to Jerusalem in Luke's gospel is not this modern, domesticated caricature. He is not running for office. He is not trying to boost His numbers. He is a king on the march, and He is not looking for fans; He is recruiting soldiers for a war. And as we see in our text this morning, He seems almost determined to scare off the casual inquirer. He sets the terms of discipleship so high that no one could possibly meet them in their own strength. He presents a series of hurdles designed to trip up the half-hearted, the procrastinator, and the sentimentalist.
This passage is deeply offensive to our therapeutic age. It is abrupt, demanding, and utterly uncompromising. Jesus confronts three would-be followers, and to each one, He delivers a hard, sharp-edged word that cuts right to the heart of their divided loyalties. He is not interested in their initial enthusiasm or their good intentions. He is interested in one thing: absolute, unconditional surrender to His lordship. And what we must see is that this is not a call to a miserable life of grim duty. It is a call to reality. The cost of following Jesus is high, but the cost of not following Him is infinitely higher. It is the cost of your own soul.
The Text
And as they were going along the road, someone said to Him, “I will follow You wherever You go.” And Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” And He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” But He said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.” Another also said, “I will follow You, Lord, but first permit me to say farewell to those at home.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
(Luke 9:57-62 LSB)
The Uncalculated Cost of Enthusiasm (v. 57-58)
We begin with the first volunteer, a man full of eager zeal.
"And as they were going along the road, someone said to Him, 'I will follow You wherever You go.' And Jesus said to him, 'The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.'" (Luke 9:57-58)
This first man's offer is expansive and absolute. "I will follow you wherever you go." It sounds wonderful. It is the kind of bold declaration we love to hear. If this were a modern altar call, we would have him sign a card and get him into a small group immediately. But Jesus does not praise his enthusiasm. Instead, He responds with a stark and sobering picture of what following Him actually entails. He doesn't question the man's sincerity, but He does challenge his understanding.
Jesus' reply is a bucket of cold water on the man's romantic notions of discipleship. Foxes have dens, birds have nests, the creatures of the world have a place to call home, a place of refuge and rest. But the Son of Man has none. This is not just a statement about poverty or homelessness. It is a profound theological statement about Christ's identity and mission. He uses the title "Son of Man," a direct reference to Daniel 7, where the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven to receive an everlasting dominion and a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. He is the rightful King of all creation. And yet, in His own creation, He is an outcast. He is rejected by the very world He came to save. He has no place of honor, no earthly headquarters, no secure base of operations.
The warning to this would-be disciple is therefore plain: to follow this King is to share in His rejection. It is to voluntarily embrace a life of instability, of being an outsider, of finding your security not in a place, but in a Person. It is to surrender your right to comfort and predictability. The world is structured to provide nests and holes for those who play by its rules. But the Kingdom of God is not of this world, and its citizens must be prepared to be aliens and sojourners here. Jesus is asking the man, "You say you will follow me anywhere. Are you prepared to follow me to a place of no earthly security? Are you willing to be homeless with me?" This is the first test: discipleship costs you your comfort.
The Unacceptable Cost of Delay (v. 59-60)
Next, Jesus takes the initiative and issues a direct summons. The response He receives is a lesson in the tyranny of the urgent over the eternal.
"And He said to another, 'Follow Me.' But he said, 'Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.' But He said to him, 'Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.'" (Luke 9:59-60)
Here, the call is not a general invitation but a specific, personal command: "Follow Me." The man acknowledges Jesus as "Lord," but immediately qualifies his obedience. "Lord, but first..." And in that "but first," we see the heart of the problem. His excuse sounds entirely reasonable, even honorable. The fifth commandment requires us to honor our father and mother, and providing a proper burial was one of the most sacred duties in Jewish culture. Most commentators agree that this was likely not a request to go to a funeral that was already planned. His father was probably still alive, and the man was asking for an indefinite leave of absence to care for his father until he died and was buried. He wanted to put his family obligations, as important as they were, ahead of the command of Christ.
Jesus' response is shocking, and it is meant to be. "Allow the dead to bury their own dead." This is a play on words. Let the spiritually dead concern themselves with the affairs of the physically dead. The affairs of the old creation, even its most solemn duties, must not take precedence over the affairs of the new creation. The command is blunt: "but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God."
Jesus is establishing a radical new set of priorities. The claims of the Kingdom are absolute and immediate. They relativize every other claim, even the most legitimate and sacred ones. Your allegiance to the King and His coming Kingdom must be so total that all other loyalties, even family loyalties, look like secondary concerns by comparison. This is not a command to be callous or to dishonor our parents. It is a command to order our loves correctly. Christ must be first. His kingdom must be sought first. Any good thing, even a commandment-mandated duty, that is placed before Christ becomes an idol. Jesus is asking the man, "Who is truly Lord? Me, or your obligations?" This is the second test: discipleship costs you your priorities.
The Unfitness of a Divided Heart (v. 61-62)
The third man, like the first, volunteers, but with a condition that reveals a heart still tied to the past.
"Another also said, 'I will follow You, Lord, but first permit me to say farewell to those at home.' But Jesus said to him, 'No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.'" (Luke 9:61-62)
This request seems even more reasonable than the last. When the prophet Elijah called Elisha to follow him, Elisha asked for permission to go and kiss his father and mother goodbye, and Elijah granted it. Surely Jesus would grant this simple courtesy. But Jesus' standard is higher than Elijah's, because He is inaugurating something far greater than a prophetic ministry. He is bringing in the Kingdom of God.
His answer comes in the form of an agricultural proverb. "No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." Anyone who has ever tried to plow a field knows that you cannot create a straight furrow if you are constantly looking over your shoulder. You must fix your eyes on a point in the distance and plow steadily toward it. To look back is to swerve, to create a crooked, useless line. The work of the Kingdom requires this same kind of single-minded, forward-looking focus.
The man's desire to say farewell was not necessarily wrong in itself, but it revealed a divided heart. His affections were still entangled with the home he was leaving behind. His emotional center of gravity was still in the past. To follow Christ is to set out on a new course, and you cannot walk a new road if you are always looking back at the old one. This is not about forbidding goodbyes; it is about the posture of the heart. The disciple's gaze must be fixed forward on Christ and the work of His kingdom. There can be no lingering, sentimental attachments to the world we have been called out of. We are to be like Lot's wife, but in reverse. She looked back and was lost. We are to look forward and be saved. Jesus is asking this man, "Where is your heart? Is it with me and the future I am building, or is it with the past you are leaving behind?" This is the third test: discipleship costs you your affections.
Conclusion: The Uncompromising Call
So we have three would-be disciples, and three hard sayings from the Lord. The first had zeal without knowledge of the cost. The second had a sense of duty that was tragically mis-ordered. The third had a desire to follow that was crippled by a divided heart. In each case, Jesus exposes the thing that stands between them and true discipleship: the love of comfort, the priority of family, and the affection for the past.
The call of Christ is a call to come and die. As Bonhoeffer rightly said, when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. You die to your right to comfort. You die to your right to set your own priorities. You die to your right to nurse your old affections. You put your hand to the plow of the kingdom, and you do not look back.
This is a hard word, but it is a word of life. Because in dying to these things, you are raised to a new life. In losing your life for His sake, you find it. The man who gives up his comfortable "hole" finds his home in Christ. The man who leaves the spiritually dead finds himself proclaiming the life of the Kingdom. The man who stops looking back finds himself part of a glorious future that God is plowing into history.
The terms of surrender are absolute. The King demands everything. But He is a good King, and what He demands from us, He has already given for us. He had no place to lay His head so that we might have a home in the house of His Father. He left His Father in glory to proclaim the Kingdom to us. He set His face like a flint toward the cross, never looking back, in order to purchase our salvation. He is not asking us to do anything He has not already done. The question for us, then, is the same one He posed to these men on the road. Will we follow Him? Unconditionally, immediately, and single-mindedly. There is no other way to follow Him at all.