Progressive reflections on the lectionary #80

Monday 1st September 2025

Luke 14:25-33 The Jesus way as an anti-empire movement

This week’s text is a provocative passage from Luke, part of his ongoing ‘discipleship’ discourse delivered during Jesus’ long walk to Jerusalem. Luke has Jesus tell the people that they cannot be his disciples if they don’t: ‘denounce their families’; ‘carry their cross’; and ‘give up their possessions.’ Weirdly most of the biblical literalists I know don’t tend to go hard on these particular verses. Shurely shome mishtake!

Here in the UK there was a documentary series on the BBC recently, about the ‘Jesus Army’, an evangelical group that formed radical communities of shared life and possessions. The documentary sketched out the tragic safeguarding failures of the movement, which resulted in certain individuals being manipulated, exploited and abused. It wasn’t a pleasant watch, particularly for someone who knew the movement a bit.

I got to know the Jesus Army when I was researching a book about New Monastic communities back in 2009. By that time they had partially rehabilitated themselves from the scandals of previous years, but in any case that wasn’t the focus of my investigation. I was more interested in the way that they modelled a way of living together in community which was radically counter cultural, and anti-capitalist. Nobody owned anything much, all resources were pooled, houses were shared. It made for a fascinating case study, and I made friends during that time who remain great friends now - long after the movement they were part of collapsed.

The documentary took aim, once or twice, at this idea of people giving up all their possessions to join the movement, it is partly this aspect of their praxis that led them to be described as a ‘cult’. There may be other valid reasons to use that label, but I’m not convinced that the pooling of resources is one of them. It is certainly a risky and costly endeavour, and my friends had to find a way to extricate themselves from that eventually, but I don’t see this as inherently antithetical to Christian teaching.

Rather, I think the problem is a bigger one - the Church in Western Europe and North America has generally failed to articulate an alternative to the capitalist norm. And yet Jesus’ words in this passage are quite clear:

“…none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Fairly unequivocal, I think we’d have to say. It does have some context though.

There are three particularly controversial aspects to this passage. They begin in verse 26 where Jesus says:

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

This seems a bit harsh, right? I mean, poor old mum and dad, poor old spouse... What I think is being got at here, though, is not so much a hatred of your stupid parents or your terrible partner, but a symbolic rejection of patriarchal kinship structures. We have noted before that in first-century Mediterranean society, family was the primary unit of economic and social control.

I suspect what is being got at here is that discipleship involves the radical step of opting out of the dominant economic system. It’s less about hating the people, and more about recognising that the family as economic institution is part of the domination system. Discipleship involves stepping out of these structures.

In verse 27 we get a further controversial remark:

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Some people are masochists by temperament, it seems to me, and they take this passage to mean that we should all suffer, all the time. I think suffering is a complex and multilayered idea, but actually I’m not sure this comment is about that sort of suffering at all.

Rather it seems to me that this is a political metaphor - it recognises the cross as a totem of political oppression. It was the punishment reserved for the lowest and most despised people - enslaved people, rebels, bandits, foreigners and those stripped of status. It marked them with shame and degradation. Roman citizens were exempt from crucifixion, it was a means of publicly shaming and terrifying people who defied the power of the empire.

To ‘carry the cross’ then means to identify oneself with the politically and economically oppressed - to live in defiance of the imperial powers of the time. A risky endeavour indeed.

I’m deliberately skipping over a big part of this passage to get to the end, and back to verse 33’s bald statement.

“So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Interpretation of this verse very much depends upon where you’re coming from - specifically: what you think the nature of the ‘gospel’ (good news) was or is. My view is that Jesus was creating and encouraging new, resistant, communities in the face of the crushing power of the empire. As such I read the call to “give up all possessions” as part of Jesus’ vision of a shared economy, where goods are redistributed, no one hoards wealth, and no one goes without - a radical egalitarianism based on trust and a shared willingness to sacrifice. Others see the concept of the gospel differently, of course.

Perhaps it’s funny that these days this last statement seems the hardest to swallow. May be that’s because we no longer have to worry about the appalling shame of crucifixion, nor do we generally perceive the family as an economic unit in the same way. We have other, similar issues, though.

I suspect that for many of Jesus’ followers, people with very little to call their own, the final of the three statements was perhaps the least risky of all. To throw in your lot with others of a like mind was no bad thing, particularly if you’ve already renounced the safety net of the family, and denied the sovereignty of the empire. Yet somehow we’ve flipped that over: *sigh*

The Church’s collective failure to articulate, promote or demonstrate a genuine alternative to capitalist economics is, I’m afraid, part of it’s tragedy.

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Image: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash