I imagine that most of us here today have a Bible.

But I don’t mean something we were given at confirmation; or bought in a shop; or found in a hotel bedroom. I mean the kind of patchwork collection of teachings, stories and parables that we carry within us. The parts of the Bible that have been especially significant to us, perhaps what we have chosen to have read at one of those special moments that mark our passage through life. We all have this Bible, and it is unique to each of us.

However, I doubt very much that many of us would include the Gospel reading we have heard this morning today. With all its references to hatred; cross-bearing; life-denial; warfare; renouncing all our possessions. These are tough, perhaps even questionable ‘asks’ for the disciples. Taken in isolation we find a Jesus who is harsh and unreasonably demanding.

There’s a great temptation for Christians to cherish the bits of the Bible we like and shuffle the uncomfortable parts to the margins. To allow our inner collection of teaching to put hard or uncomfortable words into the shade. Alternatively, we reinterpret these passages to lessen their demands – to translate away all that’s uncomfortable.  I’m not sure that’s being altogether faithful. It seems to me that Christians are called to live with the bits of Scripture we find difficult, as well as with those verses from which we take comfort.

One of the things I’ve learned from York Minster’s connection with South Africa, is just how dangerous a partial reading of the Bible can be. The whole theory of apartheid, of racial segregation and inequality, was created in the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University. And it could only happen because many passages of the Bible were muted and ignored. We need, as best as we can, to allow the breadth of the Bible to speak to us, not only the bits that we feel suit our circumstances.

Which brings us back to today’s Gospel.

I wonder whether if in this this passage, Jesus is making it clear just how much discipleship might cost. Yes, it was easy to follow Jesus when he was the talk of the town; when crowds were pressing in wanting to be near him; when miracles sprang up wherever he went; and when religious leaders saw the disciples as gatekeepers to allow access to the popular young Rabbi.

But things change.

Jesus knew that profoundly dark and difficult days lay ahead – when even a faithful disciple like Peter would earnestly deny ever having known the man. All this was to come, not because Jesus was choosing this path, but because it was the inevitable consequence of refusing to compromise with the ways of the world. Jesus is telling the disciples – and telling us – that following him might cost nothing less than everything. And, looking down the centuries of Church history we can see that it does, in each and every generation. In this tough passage of Luke’s Gospel Jesus is asking his followers:

have you understood the cost, and are you prepared to pay the price?

Perhaps what this passage says more than anything, is that Christ knows us. Knows the flimsy stuff of which we are made. Knows that we fail so easily. Knows that we never seem to be prepared for what is to come. As the poet Grahame Davies has put it so beautifully:

‘what is best of us

dissolves like incense in a chancel’

The utterly remarkable thing is that despite all of this, God loves us.

If we took this passage from Luke on its own, as a key text in our personal Bible, it might well be a text to make us despair. The cost Jesus describes is simply so great, beyond anything we can calculate. But the great thing, the truly miraculous thing, is that God is also there, beyond our imagination. So that when things become impossibly difficult, we know that God is still with us – calling us and drawing us.

As one form of invitation to Holy Communion puts it:

‘Come to this table, not because you must but because you may,

not because you are strong, but because you are weak.

Come, not because any goodness of your own gives you a right to come, but because you need mercy and help.’

In the end all that really matters, is that we are invited.

Amen.