Our Scripture for this weekend issue a stark warning: discipleship is not a comfortable journey. It is a costly and transformative fire.
Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah shows us the potter’s house. God, the master potter, is not pleased with the vessel He has made. It is marred, misshapen, a failure in its form. What does the potter do? He does not discard it. He does not throw it away. He takes the clay, a substance so pliable and responsive, and works it over again into another vessel, “as seemed good to the potter to do.”
This is a powerful image of God’s work in our lives. We are the clay, and our lives—marred by sin, shaped by the world’s values, and falling short of God’s design—are vessels that need to be remade. This is the first cost of discipleship: we must be willing to be broken and reshaped. We must allow the Master Potter to take us back to the wheel, to strip away our old forms, and to create something new, something that truly serves His purpose. This process is not painless; it is a profound act of surrendering our will to His.
In our reading from the book of Philemon, we encounter a beautiful, human example of this costly discipleship in action. Paul, a prisoner for Christ, writes a letter to his friend Philemon about Onesimus, a runaway slave. Under Roman law, Onesimus was Philemon’s property, a piece of chattel. But Paul, having encountered Onesimus and brought him to faith, now sees him as a brother in Christ. He asks Philemon to welcome Onesimus back not as a slave, but “more than a slave, as a beloved brother.”
This is a radical act. Paul is asking Philemon to abandon the worldly, legalistic, and cultural norms of his day. He is asking Philemon to see Onesimus through the eyes of Christ, to see him not by his station in life but by his new identity in faith. This is the second cost of discipleship: it challenges our social structures and redefines our relationships. Our faith demands that we love all people as Christ has loved us, regardless of their status, their history, or their worldly position. It is a love that breaks down the walls of our own biases and assumptions.
Finally, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus Himself lays out the most difficult terms of all. He tells the crowds, “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.” He goes on to say that we must carry our own cross and renounce all that we have.
These are shocking, jarring words. Jesus isn’t asking us to literally despise our families. Rather, He is using hyperbole to make a singular, unmistakable point: our love for Him must be so absolute, so all-consuming, that in comparison, all other loves—even the most sacred—pale in significance. This is the ultimate cost of discipleship: putting Jesus at the center of everything. He is not a part of our lives; He is the source and the sum of our lives. He must be the first and final authority, the lens through which we view our family, our possessions, and even our own existence.
This is the message Dietrich Bonhoeffer so powerfully articulated in his book, The Cost of Discipleship. To follow Jesus is not to accept an easy grace, but a costly one—a grace that calls us to leave everything behind and follow Him into a life of self-denial and total commitment.
So, where does that leave us today? It leaves us standing at the potter’s wheel, asking if we are willing to be remade. It leaves us with a letter from a friend, asking if we are willing to love as a brother or sister. And it leaves us at the foot of the cross, asking if we are willing to carry our own. I pray we have the courage to embrace this costly call, knowing that the reward of a life lived in Christ is a treasure that will never perish.