Jump to The gist Going deeper In the modern world The tidbit This week
Luke 14:25–33 · Majority Standard Bible
Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be My disciple. And whoever does not carry his cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple.
Which of you, wishing to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost to see if he has the resources to complete it? Otherwise, if he lays the foundation and is unable to finish the work, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This man could not finish what he started to build.’
Or what king on his way to war with another king does not first sit down and consider whether he can engage with ten thousand men the one coming against him with twenty thousand? And if he is unable, he will send a delegation while the other king is still far off, to ask for terms of peace.
In the same way, any one of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be My disciple.”
The gist
Large crowds are following Him, and He turns round and tries to thin them out. Two small parables about people who started something they could not finish, and one word in front of them that has troubled readers for two thousand years.
Going deeper
Begin with the setting, because it explains the tone. Large crowds were traveling with Jesus — this is popularity, and it is at this moment that He turns and speaks. Everything that follows is said to people who are already coming along.
Then the word.
Hate. Miseō. This book does not soften hard words, so here is exactly what the lexicons print and nothing more. Strong’s gives “to hate,” and lists as a secondary sense “by extension, to love less.” Thayer leads with “to hate, pursue with hatred, detest” — and then records that interpreters attribute to it “the signification to love less, to postpone in love or esteem, to slight,” citing Genesis 29:31, Deuteronomy 21:15, Matthew 6:24 and this verse. Thayer explains the idiom as Semitic: that Eastern speech professes love and hate where Western speech would say interest and indifference. HELPS puts it as “to detest on a comparative basis… to love someone or something less than someone else, i.e. to renounce one choice in favour of another.”
So: the harsh sense is the primary one, and the comparative sense is well attested for exactly this idiom, with Old Testament parallels named by the lexicon. It is not a case of the word secretly meaning something mild. It is a case of a Semitic construction that states a preference by naming its opposite.
And the Fathers read it that way, independently and centuries apart. St Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on this very verse, will not allow the plain sense: “This is not what the Saviour means. Away with so vain a thought. For He Who commands even those who are violent enemies to be gentle… how could He wish us to hate those who are born of the same family?” Then he does what this entry is about to do — he sets Matthew beside Luke: “For he that loves father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me.… By adding then ‘more than Me,’ it is plain that He permits us to love, but not more than we do Him.”
That is the comparison worth having in front of you, because Matthew records the same demand in gentler words:
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. (Matthew 10:37)
Same requirement. One Gospel states it as a comparison, the other states it in the Semitic idiom that names the far end. St John Chrysostom, on Matthew’s version, reaches the identical conclusion: “not commanding simply to hate them, since this were even quite contrary to the law; but when one desires to be loved more than I am, hate him in this respect.”
Then verse 27, and Luke’s wording differs from Matthew’s in a way worth noticing. Matthew says take up his cross — an aorist imperative, a command to do it. Luke says carry his cross — a different verb altogether, in the present indicative, describing a man who is already doing it and does not stop. Matthew commands the lifting; Luke describes the carrying.
Then the two parables, which are a matched pair and must be read together. A man building a tower. A king going to war. Both sit down first; both calculate; both face the prospect of a public humiliation if they get it wrong.
And the word for count is a small pleasure. Psēphizō — from psēphos, a pebble. To reckon with pebbles, one stone at a time, the way accounts were kept before there was arithmetic on paper. It occurs only twice in the New Testament: here, and in the Revelation, where the reader is told to calculate a number.
Cyril reads the second parable as spiritual warfare, and quotes Ephesians to do it: “Our wrestle is not against blood and flesh, but against governments; against empires; against the worldholders of this darkness. We have too a crowd, as it were, of other enemies, the carnal mind, the law that rages in our members, passions of many kinds.”
And then verse 33, the conclusion both parables exist to reach. Any one of you who does not give up everything he has.
The verb is apotassō — and it is the same verb, from the same Gospel, that the third man used three weeks ago when he asked to bid farewell to his family before following. In Luke 9 a man asks to apotassasthai his household and is turned away. In Luke 14 the disciple must apotassetai everything he owns. The word that was too small a request in chapter 9 has become the whole requirement in chapter 14.
Both passages, in this translation, sit under the same printed heading: The Cost of Discipleship.
In the modern world
The two parables are not, as they are usually preached, a warning against enthusiasm. Read them again: neither man is told not to build, and neither king is told not to fight. They are told to sit down first.
Which makes this the most practical passage in the volume, and the most uncomfortable, because it says that undertaking something you cannot finish is worse than not undertaking it — and that the damage is public. Everyone who sees it will ridicule him. The half-built thing stands there.
That is a real description of a certain kind of religious life. The retreat that changed everything for a fortnight. The rule of prayer taken on in January. The commitment made at a moment of feeling, abandoned quietly, and never spoken of again — and the abandoned foundation remains, visible mostly to oneself, and it makes the next attempt harder.
The remedy on offer is not lower ambition. It is arithmetic done in advance. And the king’s parable adds something the tower’s does not: if you cannot win, sue for peace while he is still far off. There is an honourable option that is neither victory nor humiliation, and it is taken early, before the armies are in sight.
Applied to an ordinary week, that is not defeatism. It is the difference between a rule of prayer you can actually keep for a year and one you will abandon in March. The passage is asking you to choose the one you can finish.
And then verse 33 refuses to let this settle into mere prudence. The cost, when you have counted it, is everything. The arithmetic is not so you can find an affordable version. It is so that you know what you are agreeing to.
The tidbit
He does this to a crowd. Every instinct anyone has ever had about growing something says that the moment the numbers are up is not the moment to explain the terms. He turns round mid-procession and prices it, twice, and finishes with the highest figure in the passage.
This week
Both parables turn on sitting down and arriving at a real number before starting, and the failure they describe is not smallness but abandonment in public. So the week does not ask you to attempt more. It asks for the honest figure and then for the version of the practice that survives seven days, because a rule you can finish is the only one that tests anything.
On the first day, sit down — the parables both insist on the sitting — and count one thing honestly. Take whatever you are currently intending about your life with God, and work out what it costs in hours, on a real week, with your actual obligations in it.
Then each day this week, keep the version you can finish. If the honest number is ten minutes, keep ten minutes every day rather than an hour twice.
It might look like this. You intend morning prayers, evening prayers, a chapter of the Gospel and the Wednesday service. Sat down with a real week in front of you — the commute, the boy’s practice, the Thursday you are not home till nine — the honest figure is about twelve minutes a day and one service a fortnight. So you keep the twelve minutes every single day, and you stop calling the rest a plan.
The man in the parable was not mocked for building small. He was mocked for laying a foundation the size of his enthusiasm and then stopping.
Scripture: Luke 14:25–33, Majority Standard Bible (Byzantine Majority Text). The MSB’s own section heading “The Cost of Discipleship” begins at verse 25 and the next heading falls at verse 34, so this is a complete unit and is printed whole. The two parables are a matched pair reaching a single conclusion at verse 33; the tower cannot be printed without the king, and neither can be printed without the verse they exist to reach. At verse 31 the MSB follows the Byzantine present tense, footnoting the critical reading. biblehub.com/msb/luke/14.htm biblehub.com/text/luke/14-31.htm
On “hate” at verse 26. The lexical entry for miseō (Strong’s 3404) gives as its primary sense “to hate, pursue with hatred, detest,” and records that interpreters attribute to it the further signification “to love less, to postpone in love or esteem, to slight,” citing Genesis 29:31, Deuteronomy 21:15, Matthew 6:24 and Luke 14:26; the same entry explains this as an idiom of Eastern speech. A second entry on the page gives “to detest on a comparative basis… to love someone or something less than someone else.” Both senses are printed above as the lexicons print them; the word has not been softened beyond what they support. biblehub.com/greek/3404.htm
Matthew 10:37 is quoted from the MSB for comparison. The passage stands in this volume at Week 6, under the MSB heading “Not Peace but a Sword.” biblehub.com/msb/matthew/10.htm
Greek, as printed in the interlinear. At verse 27 “carries” is bastazei, from bastazō (Strong’s 941), a present indicative — a different verb from the airō of Matthew 16:24, which is an aorist imperative, and Luke adds “his own cross.” At verse 28 “count” is psēphizei, from psēphizō (Strong’s 5585); the lexical entry gives its origin as psēphos, a pebble, and the sense “to count with pebbles, to compute, calculate, reckon.” It occurs twice in the New Testament, here and at Revelation 13:18. At verse 33 “gives up” is apotassetai, from apotassō (Strong’s 657) — the same verb rendered “bid farewell” at Luke 9:61, printed in this volume at Week 1; the concordance lists both occurrences under the one entry. biblehub.com/interlinear/luke/14-27.htm biblehub.com/interlinear/luke/14-28.htm biblehub.com/greek/5585.htm biblehub.com/greek/657.htm
St Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of St Luke, Sermon CV (trans. R. Payne Smith). Public domain. Its printed lemma is Luke 14:25–35, so it covers this unit and two verses beyond it, stopping cleanly before chapter 15. All quotations from Cyril above are from it, including his own juxtaposition of Matthew 10:37 with this verse. One line in the online edition of that sermon reads “more Me” where “more than Me” is plainly intended; the quotation above prints the sense. www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/cyril_…
St John Chrysostom, Homily 35 on Matthew. Public domain (NPNF Series 1, Vol. 10). Cited by homily number only: its printed lemma is Matthew 10:34 and its discussion runs to the end of that chapter. The quotation above is his comment on Matthew’s form of this saying. Chrysostom wrote no continuous homilies on Luke, and no treatment by him of the tower or the king going to war could be located; neither parable is attributed to him. www.newadvent.org/fathers/200135.htm
Claims about the cost of ancient tower construction, and about whether the figures of ten thousand and twenty thousand reflect real army sizes, could not be sourced from any of the public-domain commentaries consulted, which treat the numbers as a rhetorical illustration of unequal odds. Neither is asserted above. biblehub.com/commentaries/luke/14-28.htm
Fifty-one more like it
If one week changed how you read that passage, Follow Me has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.