The cost of following
Nowhere to lay his head
A scribe runs up, full of zeal, and offers Jesus the most generous thing a man can say: I will follow you wherever you go. It is exactly the response a teacher might want, and Jesus does not seize it. Instead He tells the truth about the road. The foxes have their dens and the birds of the sky have their nests, He says, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. Follow Me, and you follow a man with no pillow of His own. There will be no settled address, no soft landing at the end of the day.
Then another would-be disciple asks for one reasonable delay first: let me go and bury my father. It is not a frivolous request; it is duty, family, the most sacred of obligations. And Jesus answers with a hard word that has unsettled readers ever since: leave the dead to bury their own dead. The sayings sting because the break is genuinely costly. He will not dress it up, will not sell a discipleship with all the comforts left intact. The disconnect is real, and He refuses to pretend it is cheap.
“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
— Jesus — Luke 9:58 (WEB)
“Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”
Disconnect names the price before you pay it. The phase asks you to leave with your eyes open, counting what the break will actually cost rather than what you hoped it might: the security, the delay, the obligation turned excuse. It refuses to sell you a costless following, and having named the homelessness, it still says, follow.
We like to count the cost of following the way we count the price of a thing we mean to buy anyway, expecting the number to be manageable. Jesus will not cooperate. He tells you the break will cost more than you budgeted: the security you assumed you could keep, the comfortable delay you were sure was reasonable, the obligation that quietly hardens into an excuse. He says it out loud before you pay, which is its own kind of mercy. The honesty is not meant to frighten you off, but to make your yes a real yes, so it survives the homelessness it walks into. A following that was sold to you as costless would collapse the first night there was no place to lay your head. Better to hear the price now, in the daylight, from the One who has already paid more of it than you ever will. He names the cost so the disconnect, when it comes, does not feel like a betrayal of the promise.
Wherever the gospel is advertised as a costless following, the result is shallow disciples and a brittle Body, ready to scatter the first hard night. Christianity sold as comfort and conformity, with the cross quietly edited out, has always produced exactly that, a soft religion that cannot hold when the soft landing never comes. The honest call names the homelessness and the severed ties at the outset, as Christ named them on the road. Down the centuries, where the Church told the truth about the price and followed anyway, it endured persecution and exile without breaking. In our day, as cultural Christianity loses its perks, the Body learns again that what cannot be shaken was never the address. It is the One who had nowhere to lay His head.
What cannot be shaken is not the address you lose but the One you follow. Houses and nests and soft landings all give way; the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay His head is Himself the resting place that remains when every other shelter is gone.
- What did the break cost that I had not budgeted for, and am I still resenting the bill?
- Which reasonable delay have I let harden into an excuse to keep from following?
- Is my yes to Christ a real yes, given with open eyes, or one I assumed would stay comfortable?
Lord, You never sold me a costless following, and I am grateful now for the honesty. Where the break has cost more than I planned, steady me. Make my yes a real yes, eyes open, willing for the homelessness, because You are the only resting place I finally need. Amen.