Crucified with Christ

Now great crowds accompanied him, 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” (Luke 14:25–35).[1]

In the previous passage, Jesus was eating Sabbath supper in the home of the ruler of the synagogue. It was there that Jesus healed a man of dropsy on the Sabbath, confronting the Pharisees’ hypocrisy with an act of mercy. It was there, around the dinner table, that Jesus watched their posturing for prominence and then told a parable about the necessity for humility. It was there, presumably as they ate, that Jesus taught that generosity and hospitality extend beyond reciprocity. And it was there that Jesus told of the heavenly banquet that awaits not those invited but those who accept his invitation. It was likely a meal fraught with tension, and perhaps indigestion, and it served as further fodder for the Pharisees who sought to destroy him.

But what happened in the ruler’s home and what was said over supper, did not dissuade the crowds from following Jesus. As he departed, headed onward to Jerusalem, Luke tells us, “great crowds accompanied him” (Luke 14:25), telling of his popularity. But his growing popularity did not feed his ego, flame sinful pride, or foster an unhealthy sense of self-importance. Rather, our sinless Savior did not need a crowd to be glorified nor the fickle fame that comes with such a following. Instead, he challenged their very presence, saying, “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” (14:26).

Such a statement may sound to some like the rant of an egomaniac. Who would consider themselves of such supreme importance that following would require hating everyone else, especially those you love the most? Who could call for such absolute allegiance? No one rightly can but God, who incarnate said it. For, he is the Lord Jesus Christ, “very God of very God.”[2] He alone can say it and will ultimately receive the praise due him for all eternity; no one else. Therefore, he calls his disciples, then and now, to complete devotion, to love him supremely.  

Loving Christ Supremely

How then is hating all others love? Hate is a strong word. How are we to understand it? How are we to apply it?

First, we must understand that Jesus often employed hyperbole to make a point. Hatred as the antonym of love emphasizes the kind of devotion Christ demands. We see similar language, for example, in the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans, when he quotes from Genesis, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Rom. 9:13). Did God hate Esau? From a common grace perspective, clearly not, since Esau enjoyed a bounty of worldly blessings. But the biblical use the world “hated” is used to create a comparative degree of affection,[3] and in this case specifically a distinction of God’s electing love. God loved Jacob uniquely and eternally, not Esau. So, Jesus’s use of the word “hate” is helpful, because it emphasizes that our love for Christ is to be incomparable to love for anyone else.

And, this is a challenge for many of us, isn’t it? We love our parents, our brothers and sisters (sometimes?), our spouses, our children. And, oh, how we love our grandchildren! And when we search our hearts, asking honest questions of ourselves, we must ask: Do I love my family more that Jesus? Sinner that I am, sometimes I do, and maybe you do too.

I am reminded of when I was boy, and my dad took me with him to visit a family of which the children had been attending church but not the parents. When my dad knocked on the door and asked to speak to the parents, we were not invited in, but the father alone came outside to speak to us. The conversation eventually led to the church and their absence. The man explained that he didn’t mind his children attending church, but he and his wife would not. He said that his wife had been raised in a strict, legalistic so-called Christian household and as a result she had come to despise the church, and I suppose Christ too. But my dad emphasized that he could come, as the father of his children, even if his wife was not willing. I’ll never forget what he said: “I suppose if my wife is going to hell, I’ll go with her.” It was an honest answer, revealing that he loved his wife more than Christ. I don’t recall how my dad responded, but into my memory, I want to shout back in time, “She’s not worth it! Only Christ is!” Several years later, I learned, the couple divorced.

The problem with loving anyone more than Christ is not only that they’re not worth it, compared to Christ. But our love compared to Christ’s love is an inferior love. In my flesh, my greatest love for someone else is not pure but contaminated with all the impurities of my fallenness. But in Christ, and by his Spirit, in loving him supremely, he enables and empowers me to love my neighbor (and, yes, my family) as he loves me. As I tell a couple in preparation for marriage, you cannot love your spouse truly unless you love him or her in Christ firstly.

Dying to Self Daily

But it’s not just our family we are to “hate.” Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate . . . even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).The hyperbole of “hate” is the same, of course, but sinful love of self can be far more deceptive. It’s also culturally reinforced.

In his book, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, Dr. Paul Vitz argues that our religion has become essentially “a form of secular humanism based on worship of the self.”[4]Culturally, glorifying and enjoying ourselves has become our chief end. For some it’s diet and exercise, where what goes into and builds up our bodies consumes our thoughts and even our convictions.For some it’s entertainment, where boredom is bad and whatever can please us for a time is what we deserve. For some it’s money, where striving for greater returns and larger account balances serve as the definition of personal success. And the list goes on, but we need not, because the obvious point is: We love ourselves, perhaps not with so many words, but in our thoughts and actions.

Interestingly, Martin Luther defined sin as the human heart “curved in on itself,” a self-centered love where we turn inward, prioritizing our own desires, and using God’s gifts for self-gratification, rather than loving God and our neighbor.[5]We should remember that one of the characteristics of the last days is people will be lovers of self rather than lovers of God.[6]In contrast, the apostle Paul says we are to think of ourselves “with sober judgment” (Rom. 12:3),the kind of judgment that looks not to self but Christ, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5-8).And it is Christ’s cross that takes us to his analogy of bearing our own cross: “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27).

Living over two thousand years after Jesus’s crucifixion and as beneficiaries of a fully-orbed Christian theology, we are accustomed to the cross. We know Jesus would be crucified not long after making this statement. We know its significance. But they did not. Surely, Jesus’s analogy was startling.

The Romans likely adopted the practice of crucifixion from the Greeks who adopted it from the barbarians. It was indeed a barbaric form of capital punishment, designed to prolong death for maximum torture. Under Roman rule, crucifixion was reserved for non-citizens, foreigners, or slaves convicted of crimes such as murder, rebellion, or armed robbery. Expressing what was likely the common view of a Roman citizen, Cicero shunned even verbalizing the word, saying,

the very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things or the endurance of them, but liability to them, the expectation, indeed the mere mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man.”

And this was not only the Gentile perspective of the cross, but the Jews regarded the cross with equal or greater disdain, since God’s law states, “a hanged man [upon a tree] is cursed by God” (Deut. 21:23).[7] The cross was a cultural and religious anathema for Jew and Gentile alike, which is likely why Jesus used the analogy.

To take up our cross is, as one commentator says, “to put oneself into the position of a condemned man on this way to execution.”[8] Jesus’s analogy of the cross does not mean putting up with something or someone difficult or bearing up under a situation. The cross is the symbol of death, and that’s what Jesus means. “When Christ calls a man,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “he bids him come and die.”[9] But what does Christ’s death have to do with our death and bearing our own cross?

Theologically speaking, we may understand the cross legally and morally. Legally, through faith in Christ we have died to sin, as Christ died for us in our place, and resurrected from the dead giving us new life in him. Legally, we have been forgiven of our sin (past, present, and future) and reconciled to God, completely and eternally. This is why the apostle Paul could confess, and so may we, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Legally, we are dead to self and alive to Christ. But morally, we are to be actively engaged, deliberately dying to our sin nature, living daily in the victory of Christ’s resurrection, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Daily, we must crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. Legally, we have been crucified; morally, we are crucifying. By way of comparison, John Stott explains, “one might say, every Christian is both a Simon of Cyrene and a Barabbas. Like Barabbas we escape the cross, for Christ died in our place. Like Simon of Cyrene we carry the cross, for he calls us to take it up and follow him . . .”[10]

Living for Christ Truly

Following Christ then is no trivial matter. Rather than the methods of modern easy-believism, Jesus tells us to “count the cost” (Luke 14:28). Whether in building a tower or waging war, we must consider the cost of following Jesus. But Jesus is not talking about merely good planning or prudent evaluation. He’s talking about a devotion so strong that everything else is incomparable. He’s talking about a devotion so faithful that everyday death to self is required. He’s talking about a devotion so true that everything else is renounced. Matthew Henry says that discipleship “will cost [us] the mortifying of [our] sins, even the most beloved lusts; it will cost [us] a life of self-denial and watchfulness, and a constant course of holy duties; it may, perhaps cost [us our] reputation among men, [our] estates and liberties, and all that is dear to [us] in this world, even life itself.”[11]

The verb Jesus uses, when he says, “any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (14:33), is translated elsewhere, for example, as “say farewell” (Luke 9:61) or take “leave” (Acts 18:18). To “renounce all” is to say “goodbye” to everything. To “renounce all” is to say goodbye to anything that would supersede loving Christ supremely. To “renounce all” is to crucify self and all its desires to put anything else on the throne of our lives than Christ. “Salvation by grace is free,” Phil Ryken says, “but following him will cost us everything we have.”[12] But lest we forget, my life and your life cost Jesus his.

Such renouncing is not turning from something to nothing, as if we are to empty ourselves of all desire, but to everything that Christ is for us. Let us not look back to what we have said goodbye, like Lot’s wife, but look to Jesus, “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2). The shame, suffering, and death of the cross were not joy for Christ but looking through it, he focused on the joy to come, his resurrection, the salvation of his people, his eternal glory. And his joy is ours, as we have been crucified with Christ, we love him supremely, die to self daily, and live for him truly, serving as salt in a world that needs to “taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Ps. 34:8).

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[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version 

(Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).

[2] The Nicene Creed

[3] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 90.

[4] Quoted in John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 268.

[5] https://reflections.yale.edu/article/reformation-writing-next-chapter/prayer-other-curve

[6] 2 Tim. 3:1-5

[7] I have drawn the references and general outline here from John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 29-30.

[8] Ibid., 272.

[9] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. R.H. Fuller, Irmgard Booth, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 2018), 6.

[10] John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 271.

[11] “Counting the Cost to Follow Christ,” Tabletalk, Vol. 47, No. 7 (July 2023): 59.

[12] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 95.