Is giving your coat away an act of true discipleship?

The poet in me always seems to need to fill the white space with words. 

Just as the raconteur needs to fill the silence with stories. 

Years ago as a student in Salisbury walking home from my girlfriend's house to the college in the Cathedral Close I was stopped by two young men who demanded money from me with menaces. 

I had no money so I explained that I was simply not in a position to assist them.

They became more threatening and suddenly the taller of the two demanded that I gave them my coat.

This was a more challenging demand after all I suddenly thought, what did John say:

If you have two coats give one away!

But this was my favourite coat.  It was a special coat.  it was a coat that I needed to stay warm in the winter so I refused to part with my coat. I chose to keep it. A risky decision given that I was outnumbered two to one.

But risky also because I was a student claiming to live a christian life and in time to become both a leader and a servant in the church of God.

Giving my coat away might have been an act of christian discipleship. Keeping it might have been pretty graceless.

So after some further argument and some threats I and my assailants went our separate ways.

By the time I arrived at the Cathedral the Close was closed and the policeman had locked the gate to keep the residents safe. To get in I had to scale a wall and then jump across an alleyway before I could climb up and over and into the back of the college grounds.

I have to confess to spending time thinking about the encounter and in fact still do.

Parting with my coat would have been costly in money and time.

I would have had to replace it. 

I would have had to spend time shopping. 

I may not have found a coat as good. 

I might have had to spend more than I could afford.

But I also struggled with what costly discipleship means in practice.

I had chosen not to give my coat to a stranger who may well have needed it more than me.

Many years later this story came back to me. I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time and studying at the Episcopal Divinity School.

One of the courses that I was auditing was titled: The Costs of Discipleship.

Discipleship is costly, as Peter realised when he challenged Jesus in Mark 8, the word used was Rebuke Peter rebuked Jesus, Jesus in turn rebuked Peter.

The definition of rebuke is to speak angrily to someone because you disapprove of what they have said or done.

Jesus had spoken of his rejection, his death and his resurrection I guess that must have shocked Peter, how could that be? Messiah, saviour, leading us to freedom doesn't square with rejection, death and (unbelievably) resurrection.

So the disciple rebukes the Rabbi.

But Jesus, possibly aware of the challenges ahead, rebukes the disciple, don't try to head me off the path I'm set on.

But Jesus opens up the debate more widely, anyone listening to the exchange is I invited not just the apostles already called and chosen but we are all invited to take up our cross. 

Following Jesus is a risky business, if you want to save your life you will lose it but if you lose your life for Jesus sake and the sake of the Gospel, you will save it.

So it seems that costly discipleship is open to anyone who seeks to follow Jesus, not just those called to be disciples, the simple truth is that for anyone who seeks to follow Jesus there will be sacrifice involved. 

So for Mark in his Gospel as we read it this week, discipleship is not some comfortable affiliation with Jesus but rather a life changing and potentially life threatening commitment.

The trouble with so much of our ministry and our claims to discipleship is that we are required to live and act in ways that are counter cultural. There will be hostility, we will be mugged, threatened and challenged but if we are to restore the broken and the outcast there will come a time when we need to give our coat away to one whose needs are greater than ours.


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