Counting the Cost?

I have a magnet on my refrigerator with a quotation attributed to Goethe: “What you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” It turns out that this isn’t exactly something the great German writer said, and it has its misty origins in Faust, the classic story of the man who sold his soul to the devil. Nevertheless, it has a lot to do with the way I approach the most significant choices in my life. It drives the more careful planners among my family and friends to distraction. They tend to be much more the ones who can identify with the examples Jesus gives in today’s Gospel.

He tells the great crowd gathered around him that they need to be willing to carry a heavy cross if they’re going to continue to follow him. He’s laying out the consequences for those who need to know the cost of something before they begin. The planners, the strategists, the cautious ones are the one who nod knowingly at the stories of the builder left with an unfinished tower or the commander facing impossible odds on the battlefield.

I can understand these examples, but I’m more likely to follow the Victorian architects who regularly designed “follies” on great estates: intentional ruins, unfinished structures, stairs going nowhere. Or the romantic stories of commanders like Henry V, taking on the French army with a ragtag band of loyal followers.

Jesus realistically reminds his followers that if they can’t bear the idea of the cross, they’ll never be able to bear the real thing. And bear it they must. He’s asking nothing less than everything. But at some point following Jesus is still a glorious leap of faith. I think that perhaps what Jesus was doing was less telling them to make a rational, calculated decision than simply warning them that the going was going to get a lot rougher than they imagined. He didn’t want them to follow him blindly, to delude themselves with dreams of easy victory and earthly triumph. It reminds me a bit of the times my parents would caution me about doing something reckless and then saying, “If you get hurt, don’t come crying to me.” I knew they were exasperated (often with good reason) but I also knew that they’d be there to pick me up.

Counting the cost isn’t always the best way to approach our lives. How often have you heard someone say, “If I had known what the outcome would be, I never would have started.” And yet they’re not sorry they did. When they look back, they see that somehow through God’s grace they found the strength to keep going, to see something through, to discover the new life on the other side of the abyss.

The goal of following Jesus is not a profitable corporation, a successful military campaign or a well-constructed building. The goal is the resurrection won by his victory over death, a victory that was far more of a high-stakes gamble that a well-oiled machine. The cost of following Jesus can’t be calculated in a spreadsheet and amortized over time. But the retirement plan is, as the bumper sticker says, “out of this world.”