Now great multitudes 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 it, all who see it will begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build, and was not able to finish!'
"Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel, whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, when the other is yet a great way off, he sends an embassy and asks terms of peace.
"So, therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
"Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is fit neither for the land nor for the dunghill; men throw it away! He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
1 comment:
He is a prophet, after all, and has realized that he's called to go Jerusalem, where the hostility he has already encountered will be more powerful, more entrenched-- and as he's said, where he expects to die.
It isn't necessarily so, that following him there will cost anyone else his life. But it will certainly mean facing that possibility; it will certainly mean a loss of what a person has been accustomed to call "his" life.
One could read the part about "salt" to mean throwing away human beings, to viewing them as either "good for something" or "good for nothing." But this does not seem consistent with his own attitude towards them, or with God's care for them. But referring to an established form of religion... either it works as a catalyst, to help a person burn up what's unworthy in him, to become what God intends him to be (which was the main use for salt in that time & place, to make dung burn cleanly in an oven)-- or it has worn out, and if its power isn't renewed, is fit to be discarded.
Post a Comment