The Cost of Following Jesus | Mark 10:32-45

March 22, 2026 - The Gospel of Mark - 

Jerell Carper takes a closer look at the three times Jesus predicts his death while he and the disciples are on the road to Jerusalem. Each time, his closest followers miss the point, and Jesus uses these moments to teach his disciples about the costly path of discipleship. Rather than climb the social hierarchy, abundant life is found in the cross-shaped life of service and giving up our lives. 

/// Fifth Sunday of Lent ///

The Gospel of Mark: Part 5

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All right. Uh today it's kind of part two from last week. Last week we talked about Jesus creating wide tables and creating bread for everyone. And maybe that felt made you feel a little uncomfortable. Don't worry, today you will also feel uncomfortable, but in the other direction. Today's sermon is called The Cost of Following Jesus. The cost of following Jesus. So last week we we looked at the way Jesus spoke and showed how God's news moved moved beyond the boundaries of Israel. God's people are like a river that flows outward. We are making the unclean clean and not the other way around. There is bread for everyone, so we should build bigger tables. Remember, we got the leaves out and made them bigger. But the sermon today is really the other side of the coin. And this might make us feel uncomfortable if at last week at any point you were saying, Gerald, this sounds really good, but what about some of the demands that Jesus puts on our life? Is this just like everyone's welcome to the table, the end, or is there more to the story? Last week we talked about proclaiming the gospel with wide tables, but this week we're talking about forming disciples on a narrow road. A wide table, which is the entry point for encountering Jesus, but a narrow road is the pathway of becoming like Jesus. So as we've journeyed through Mark, we met Jesus in the wilderness. We heard his kingdom acts, we saw his kingdom acts, we heard his kingdom parables, and we saw how the good news is expanding beyond the bounds of Israel. But what we haven't drawn attention to is that this whole time Jesus has been doing and saying these things, he hasn't been alone, right? He hasn't been alone. We've kind of skipped over these parts, but if you go back, you would know that Jesus has had kind of a ragtag group of apprentices following him around, seeing what he's doing, going where he goes, and doing what he does. There is sense, both literally and figuratively, following Jesus and with the goal of becoming like their rabbi, becoming like their teacher. So many of us know these apprentices by the word disciple. It's kind of a word that Christians say that I don't know how many other people say it, but we do. So there's a lot that we learn about these disciples in this book, but we also learn about other types of people in the book, and this is what Mark calls the crowds or the multitudes. So there's the disciples and there's the crowds. The crowds show up when Jesus is teaching, they hear good teaching, and then they leave and they go on their way. They also show up for Jesus' healings and miracles, and then they leave and go on their way. But the disciples are not the crowds. The disciples are following Jesus, they're apprentices of Jesus. So let's take a look at how Mark talks about these followers and what we can learn from them as we think of ourselves as followers of Jesus. So the very first time we hear about disciples or followers of Jesus is in Mark chapter 1. Jesus calls two sets of kind of blue-collar fishermen brothers. They must know enough about Jesus. He's presenting himself as a rabbi. He says, Hey, drop your nuts, come follow me, come be my disciples. They do, they leave everything and they follow Jesus to be their teacher. This is Simon, Andrew, James, and John. Then later on in Mark chapter 2, Jesus calls this guy named Levi or Matthew, and he is a tax collector. So familiar with kind of the context, Israel is under Roman oppression, and Levi would have taken the job as being the intermediary between Rome and Israel and collecting their taxes, which were unfair and unjust for these people, as well as he was part of a system that gleaned a lot off the top. And so he was a bad guy, a sellout to the enemy, making money off the backs of people like Simon, Andrew, James, and John. People are confused about this. This is where Jesus says, Hey, I haven't come to save the righteous, but sinners. He's eating and dining with tax collectors and sinners. These are the people who need a doctor, he says. He's got a big table. In Mark chapter 3, we learn about the fact that there's 12, and he kind of, Jesus presents himself as a rabbi. He gives these apostles his yoke, which is his teaching, so that they would imitate his ethics, his lifestyle, and his practices. And then in chapter 6, which is kind of hilarious to me, Jesus sends them out on this mission to go proclaim the good news and heal people. Like these are the most unqualified people, and they're already in go mode. And I like to think of it Jesus' kind of theology of teaching or practice of teaching is very hands-on and practical. Like, gotta get out there and do it before you're ready, learn on the fly, and good luck. But basically, whatever Jesus does, the disciples are with him. And then we kind of cover some of the teachings that we've had so far. We don't hear too much about the disciples specifically until we get to Mark chapter 8, 9, and 10. So I want to show you this chart up here. When we read books of the Bible, or especially the Gospels, we need to read them also at a thousand-foot level. I think we've been taught to read verse by verse, word by word, line by line. But Mark is smarter than us, he's a better writer than us, and he has crafted this piece of literature beautifully and to connect to itself. And so you'll see these patterns in Mark chapter 8, 9, and 10. And what Mark does is he presents Jesus primarily being in the north at the beginning of the book. The middle of the book shows Jesus journeying to Jerusalem, and then the third third of the book is Jesus in Jerusalem. And so there are these three occasions where Jesus is on the way or on the road or on his way with his disciples traveling to Jerusalem where he knows what's going to happen to him. So in a very literal, direct sense, they are on a path, and Jesus is walking, and they are actually following him on this path, like in a very literal sense. But this is a picture of what they should be doing in a spiritual sense and an emotional sense and a relational sense to Jesus. They're following him on the way. And there's this pattern that shows up in Mark 8, 9, and 10, where Jesus predicts his death. And Mark says very clearly, remember, he's been talking in parables and kind of being vague, but he is just outright, very clear what's going to happen to him. He's going to go to Jerusalem, he's going to die, he's going to rise. Three days later, each of these death predictions are contrasted by the disciples kind of being knuckleheads, right? They are just not getting it, and their posture is actually the exact opposite of what Jesus has just tried to tell them. And Jesus, with more patience than I would have, has this like teachable moment experience. All right, everyone, gather around. Let me tell you something about what it actually looks like to follow me that you are not getting. You're not understanding. And even by the third time, I think that they don't. So let's look at these really quickly, one by one. So Mark chapter 8, Jesus makes the first prediction of his death. Here's what he says He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, the teachers of the law. So this is the contrast posture. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. Okay, so then here's his teaching. He calls the crowd to him. He says, This Whoever wants to be my disciple, okay, whoever wants to be a follower of me, an apprentice of me, not the crowds, a follower. You must deny yourselves themselves, take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. And then what good is it for someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their soul? What can you give in exchange for your soul? So Peter is not having this, but Jesus calls his disciples and he says a few things. You need to take up your cross and follow me. If you actually want to gain life, it's gonna come through this path of losing it first. Okay, it's kind of meta, it's kind of tricky. We're not just talking about death and dying, though, we're talking about taking up a cross. Okay, so that's that's specific, and we're gonna come back to that. But the big idea is that following Jesus is going to cost you your life. It might mean actual death, which it has for a lot of Christians throughout the world, but it certainly means a release of your kind of personal objective, your values, um, or the lifestyle that flows out of your opinions or the values and the hierarchies of the world around you. In some sense, whoever you are has to die in order to find life in Jesus, on the path with Jesus, to be his disciple. If you want to be his disciple, this is what it looks like. Okay, so the disciples, it's like a like in one ear, out the other, tractor beam moment. All right. Second prediction of the death of his death, Mark chapter nine. Um, they didn't understand, and so they left the place, they passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were. He was teaching his disciples. He says to them, All right, the Son of Man is going to be delivered to the hands of men. They will kill him. After three days he will rise. But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it. It's kind of a bummer. So they came to Capernaum, and when he was in the house, he asked them, Hey, hey, my dudes, what were you guys talking about on the road? What were you arguing about? But they kept quiet because on the way they had been arguing about who was the greatest. So Jesus is walking to his death, he's predicting his death. Disciples are back behind him, arguing amongst themselves, like which one of us is the greatest? And Jesus has got his like, you know, Jedi skills. Um, he's using the force, he hears what he knows what they're saying, he calls them out, and they're like, it's just little kids getting in trouble. Like they're just silent. Don't no one say anything, what we're talking about. And so Jesus, all right, teachable moment number two. You guys aren't getting this. Jesus calls the 12 and he says, Okay, anyone who wants to be first must be the very last and the servant of all. You guys want to be great. You're arguing about who the greatest is. Let me tell you what greatness is it's being a servant and it's being least and it's being last. It's being last place. Anyone ever got last place something? I'd love to know about that sometime. All right, so Jesus calls to them and he's talking about a new social order, new roles. Um, this word servant is actually the word minister where we get the word deacon, diaconos, so a deacon or a minister or servant. So think about like a minister in the church. You should be the servant of people in the church. You shouldn't be the hero. Um, all right, so you got to take last place position, which for them is a place of shame in this kind of honor-shame society. Okay, we get to Mark 10. Jesus makes a third prediction of his death, death. It's very clear if you're reading Mark. It's awesome. So Jesus has this encounter with a rich young ruler. He's like, hey, if you want to follow me, you have to sell all your money. He's kind of bummed. He doesn't want to do that. And Jesus says again, hey, I'm gonna die. So they're on their way up to Jerusalem, so they're getting closer now. And Jesus is leading the way, and his disciples were astonished. This is what this is what Justin just read, while those who followed were afraid. All right, we're going up to Jerusalem. I'm gonna die. Okay, so then James and John, um, also called the Sons of Thunder, the sons of Zebedee, come to him and say, Hey, teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask. So they start making demands of God. We know what this is like. We do this all the time. It's like, all right, what do you want to do for what do you want me to do for you? We want to sit at your left and your right in glory. And Jesus starts talking about drinking the cup of suffering and then being baptized with his death. And they're like, Yeah, we can do it. He doesn't really, they don't really know what they're saying. The other disciples hear this and they're actually pretty bummed. Like, why are you trying to sneak your way to the highest position without us? So clearly, they're not like the light bulbs are not going off. Something about following Jesus for them is not sinking in. So Jesus comes to his kind of his teachable moment, and he says, You know that like the Gentiles, the Greeks, their leaders have this heavy hand, they lord it over their subjects, their high officials exercise this kind of strict authority. But not so with you. If you want to be great, you must become a servant. If you want to be first, you have to be a slave, you have to become like a slave. For even the son of man, and this is a title Jesus keeps using of himself, this is out of Daniel 7. The son of man is kind of this godlike king figure who has all the power and all the might. And Jesus is kind of claiming to be this person. So, this is the person that you would least think would suffer as a messianic title. And Jesus is saying, even this person, even me and my greatness, I'm gonna have to suffer and serve. So, so are you. For the disciples, they want the Messiah to be this kind of figure that leads them out of oppression from Rome. But they are on the way of Jesus, following him to his death. And this is exactly what it means to be a disciple. So I I've talked about this before, but I had the pleasure of counseling, camp counseling at a camp in uh northern Wisconsin after during my grad school years. Um, and what what I would do is we would take these kind of spoiled, it was an expensive, nice camp. So we're taking these kind of spoiled Chicago kids, like Chicago suburb kids, like five hours up into the Wisconsin wilderness, and it was a three-week camp for them. But the first six days, we would just the next day they'd wake up, we'd hand them a backpack, we'd pack it, and we were out in the woods for a five-night backpacking trip. And these little kids with these big heavy backpacks arguing about, you know, they don't want to carry the heavy things, they're all excited. And for whatever reason, I got always got put on the northern route, which was one of two routes. And this this was one that was just it was way worse. There was no firewood at the fire at the campsites. Most of the maps were old. We would bushwhack for three or four hours through like thorny things, like using a compass, trying to find our campsite, and these kids, they just have no idea. And part of me is this kind of feels like how Jesus was thinking, he knows what's ahead, and we are kind of his followers, like misinterpreting the journey. Like, we're actually going to be bushwhacking through thorns, we are not cruising out in the woods. And so, Jesus, like, I I don't want this to sound too familiar to us. Jesus wants his disciples to know, and there's another slide, Alex, this is what the narrow road looks like. This is what the path of following Jesus is. You take up your cross, you follow him, you lose your life, you become last place, and you become a servant and a slave. And at a social level and a kind of a posture to other people. And one of the reasons that this is important, or one of the most important pieces about this, is this idea of taking up your cross. So in its original context, this is a specific way to die and a specific social location. So in the first century, Greco-Roman world social classes were really distinct and they existed within an honor and shame culture. There are the haves and the have-nots. Um, and the Romans popularized this so much in their governments that it satured saturated the culture of the Greco-Roman world. Everywhere you went, every social setting was marked by where you stood, kind of on the social totem pole, even so much that within slaves, within the lowest class, they would even find ways to rank themselves. It's like it's the air they breathe, the water they swam in, is honor and shame hierarchy. If you could, you would want to climb the ladder. But Jesus is saying we're not going from rags to riches. We're actually going from riches to rags. And if you happen to find yourself a slave, you were either born a slave or you were captured in war, your status would be completely canceled out. Your identity would be lost. Your money, your property, your accolades, and your inscriptions, which titles and honor, like accolades were huge in this time. If you were a slave, the thing you wanted most was to become free. You wanted to no longer be a slave, you were without honor. And if you happened to die as a slave, you weren't quite the lowest of the low. But if you happened to die by crucifixion as a slave, you were the lowest of the low. There's no way to socially come back from this. Crucifixion is a form of death that's invented by the Romans. It's not just to cause pain, but to primarily cause shame. It's for traitors and it's for criminals and it's for the worst of the slaves. The whole point is that it's public, it's slow exposure, and it's ultimate humiliation. Crucifixion is about humiliation in a society obsessed with honor. If you were crucified, you would have no burial, you would have no honor, you would have nothing left of their humanity. One of the phrases would be basically, you're you're calling them a slave thing. A slave thing. So to be seen carrying a cross means that you are still alive, but you are walking and you are carrying your instrument of humiliation. You're letting everyone see that you have miserably lost at the game in this system of honor and wealth and status. James and John are asking to be seated on Jesus' left and right, and the only other time that Mark uses that phrase is when Jesus talks about the criminals on his left and on his right during his crucifixion. And by the way, there wouldn't have just been three crosses, there would have been a whole row of them down the road, hundreds. We think of three because, well, the flannel graph Bibles that we read, I guess. But okay. So the cross isn't just like an architecture piece for your church building to say this is a church. It's not just for your shiny necklaces, Justin. Um it is the final act of a life of someone who has lost everything, absolutely lost everything that society considers to be honorable, dignifying, and successful. So when Jesus tells his followers, if you want to be my apprentices and you want to imitate me, you have to lose what is considered life to join him in the rags without honor and without status. You take up your cross. So I wonder for us today, okay, we don't live in Rome. We understand honor and shame. We're not primarily an honor-shame society, although I would almost think we're moving back in that way. Um, what does this mean for you and uh you and I? Who are the haves and who are the have nots in our society? I did a little reading and research and thinking, and I came up with three attributes that I think are the haves in our societies today. You can, you know, talk to me after the service if you think I missed one or got it wrong. The first is this is that we have control over our lives. We have control over our lives. I think the highest capital capital is freedom for us. We want flexible schedules, we want remote work, we want the ability to go wherever we want, whenever we want. I like to think about this the couple with the decked-out sprinter van. No kids, dual passive income, four-wheel drive, roof racks, everything. You can travel, sleep, and you can see the world. And then along comes with this kind of cultural capital. You're educated, you're aware, you're socially fluent. But at the end of the day, we don't want anyone telling us what we have to do or where we have to be. And so the haves in this in this society, I think now, are the people who have unlimited freedom. They don't have limits to their money or their time or their responsibilities. I think this is part of our American culture from the beginning. Two, we want comfort and consumption. We want to have stuff. We want to accumulate wealth, possessions, and experiences if you're a millennial like me. We want nice cars, we want nice vacations, we want nice clothes, we want nice electronics. We consume and we discard and we consume. The social media empire and influencers are built on this marketing expertise, and I think that they have a headlock on most of our hearts. The world says gain, but Jesus says give. And then third, autonomy and validation. We want to define ourselves the way that we feel. So, kind of deep within our cultural climate, right now, everyone is feeling this. Our cultural climate says you can decide for yourself who you are. You're we're told that our identity is found within us. If we feel it, it's true. And others need to validate and affirm whatever our inner experience is. Our goal is to become our best self, smartest, fittest, strongest, most pretty. And our happiness would align to our inner emotions. And so our world is saying define yourself, but Jesus is saying deny yourself. These are the haves in our world: freedom and flexibility, comfort and consumption, autonomy and affirmation. This is the abundant life. Only as those who follow Jesus, we're invited to recognize that this path does not, in fact, lead to life, and we actually climb down the ladder. We give up our freedom, we embrace limits of time and location and money so that we can embed in our neighborhoods, in our community, in our workplace. We give up our comfort and consumption with radical generosity, radical generosity and thoughtful purchases. And our goal isn't to become authentic to ourselves. And so when you and I, when we signed up to follow the path of the have nots, we chose the path of lowliness and dishonor and the narrow road that, if we actually believe it, leads to life. There's a scholar, Michael Gorman, who kind of coined the term cruciformity, cross-shaped, the form of the cross. He has a lot of good writing articles and books on the cross-shaped life. If you want to nerd out, Michael Gorman, cruciformity, have ChatGPT summarize it for you. So I want to talk a little bit about the the church in light of this. Jesus' invitation, like what if what if those values aren't just out there? What if those values have found their way in here? Jesus' invitation to his disciples and the end of his time with them is that they would go out and make more disciples. Okay, so you're you're following Jesus on the road, go make more followers. Jesus did not ask them to create or plant churches or have cool programs. He didn't ask us to preach good sermons or our Bible studies or small groups or men's ministries or women's ministries or youth groups or cool like Easter egg hunts for the community. He told his disciples to make more disciples. That is the goal. And all these things, planting churches and Bible studies and sermons, these are good things, but they have to lead to disciples. Like if what we're doing here as a church isn't ultimately creating disciples, then we're missing Jesus' great commission. And I wonder if many churches that we've like kind of the modern consumer church evangelical model is actually designed more for crowds than for disciples. Crowds are there to pop in and receive some teaching and some religious goods and services and then check out. You can skip once or twice a week, you're mostly disconnected. And I think that this does not actually form followers of Jesus. This is high invitation but low challenge. But we're talking about a wide table and a narrow road, which is high invitation, high challenge. We are called to die to ourselves, to become a servant, to give up our life and put on Christ. This requires work and sacrifice. This is a really bad business model. Come to our group where you learn how to die to yourself. Um also give us money and get to know one another and carve out time and go serve your neighbors. Like it doesn't really pencil out, right? And citizens, our church is not here to draw crowds, we're here to make disciples. And so my job as your pastor is to be, first of all, myself, be a faithful disciple of Jesus, and then to kind of gather the troops and say, imitate me as I imitate Christ. Follow me on this narrow road. It's actually going to cost you your life. It's been said that if you make a church, you may make disciples, but if you make disciples, you will make a church. I want us to think about our church like a discipleship training team. The goal is to become followers of Jesus who find life on the other side of laying hours down. It's training. We are here to put in work and grow, like you do on any type of sports team where you're trying to get better as a group. You train and you practice and you sweat, and there's like preseason boot camp and practices multiple times a week because we're all here to collectively work together to be more faithful disciples together. And we're a team. This is a community, we're not individuals. So, this like this is our church. You are on this team. We are trying to become disciples together, and that is gonna cost all of us everything. And I, first and foremost, have to bear that and live a life that you guys could follow. This is not just a remodel or a renovation, it's an entire rebirth. And when we baptized, we actually, when we were baptized, we died to ourselves, we come to new life in Christ. So are you in your life with citizens, are you viewing yourself as a disciple or as a crowd member? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who many of you know in 1937 wrote a book that we now know as the cost of discipleship, but originally it was just called following. I think more recent models versions just call it discipleship. Um, he wrote this during the rise of Adolf Hitler as the Nazi state had increasing control over the church. Bonhoeffer identified with something called the confessing church that was saying, hey, our allegiance is to Jesus alone. But the heart of this book lies with Bonhoeffer's confrontation of what he calls cheap grace. Cheap grace. This is Christianity without discipleship or obedience or the cross. He called the church to re-center on the teachings of Jesus and recover a Christianity that actually follows Jesus, not just believes the correct ideas about him. And so rather than cheap grace, which is forgiveness without obedience, Bonhoeffer calls for costly grace. It's freely given, but it's not cheap. Through it we participate in the suffering of Jesus. And the most famous line from this book is when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. And so we're confronted. Are we gonna, are the light bulbs gonna go off for for us, right? Are we gonna be like James and John and the disciples? Are we still gonna play the game of greatness, or are we gonna step on the path and follow Jesus to costly death? So if you're like me, you're like, okay, that was cool, Gerrell. Nice, cool stuff. What am I supposed to do? How do I respond to this sermon? I want to give you four things. The first is pray. The first is pray. Just spend some time wrestling with God through this idea and asking yourself, am I a disciple of Jesus? Pray that God would show you his ways, that he would show you his paths, he would help you see and follow. Kind of come to terms with yourself. Second is walk. Walk. Put yourself in the places where God's God is working and moving. And I guarantee you, if you start, you start going out into the world, you will encounter places where you have the opportunity to give up your life, to give up your time and your money and your resources and your home and your energy and your attention and your affections. It won't take long. I will bring you to Hosea or every child, and you'll be good for a while. All right. Pray, walk, and then discern. So as a community, we have to ask ourselves all right, we have kids, we have houses, we have jobs. Like, is Jesus asking us to just like sell everything and like walk around like homeless, vagabonds? Like, what does this mean? Like, what does it look like for each of us to actually faithfully follow this? We need the community of one another to do that. So, like Citizens Church, we are together helping one another decide where that line is of sacrifice for Jesus. And then the last one, I wrote down send it. I don't know. Just send it. Uh take the leap, take the risk, resist the system, just start doing some things that look foolish in the world and climb down the ladder. Live in a way that you actually need to trust God, that you need him to show up. And that is the posture of our church. And finally, I want to conclude with some good news. That kind of sounded bad news, but it's good. First of all, Jesus led the way and laid down his life for you. This has and always will be the character of God, that he is willing to put himself in front of death for your sake. And the world operates in a way where the creator of the universe comes down to our level, becomes one of us, and dies in our place for us. If we haven't wrestled through that reality, it's going to be hard for us to respond faithfully. And secondly, death is the path, but life is the destination. Jesus is not withholding life from you, he's showing you the way to it. Just what we think will bring us true and abundant life is not the correct wide path. Rather, it's the narrow road, it's the cross shaped Jesus imitating life.