Follow thou me

An audio version of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 8: 18-22) contains two very brief dialogues between Jesus and two of his would-be followers. To the first of these who offers to follow the Lord, Jesus tells him that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. To the second, who must first go to bury his father, Jesus tells him to let the dead bury their own dead.

In a way, the second of these is the easiest to understand. Jesus’ language is hyperbolic, of course, but we are used to that by now: if your eye offends you, pluck it out. If Jesus is savage here, it is no doubt because it is what He perceived the man needed to hear; not because there was anything unpraiseworthy in burying his own father. Indeed, since the Lord commanded the Jews to honour their father and their mother, one might even say that burying his father was part of the man's fulfilment of the law. There is some circumstance behind this request that the gospel does not communicate to us; there is some hidden agenda or attachment that slows this man down in the following of the Lord. And the Lord, because he loves the man so much, is brutally frank with him.

It is the first of these dialogues which is more complex and yet, perhaps, more important, because it touches on a more subtle fault then mere attachment to family. That at least is human. But what is the problem with the first questioner? After all, his offer to follow the Lord seems to be supremely generous. Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go. It is not just that the man is offering to become a disciple of the Lord. He seems here to have taken account of the literal vagaries of Jesus’ ministry: wherever you go. Well, perhaps he had - at a very material level. The scribe must have noted Jesus’ wanderings between the various towns and villages of the Holy Land. What he had perhaps not noticed is that the following of Jesus was not going to be merely an outward journey. It was destined more particularly to be an inward journey, a journey into those twin mysteries that surround us: the enthralling mystery of the Eternal Godhead and the bewildering mystery our deeply flawed selves; a journey into life, but also a journey into the night. If we tell the Lord that we would follow Him wherever He goes, we have to know exactly what that means. Perhaps like many things in the Christian life, however, its full meaning escapes our limited understanding.

So, was the Lord sending this man away? Not definitively or ultimately. The fact is that there are different ways to follow the Lord. Some of us may be called to follow Him wherever He goes in every sense of the word, taking nothing with us, being stripped of everything we otherwise cling to in ways we have not even begun to imagine. Yet others may be asked to become other kinds of follower; there is more than one kind of flower in the garden of the Lord. In the Christian life and in the galaxy of spiritualities, everything is good, but not everything is good to do. This is a paradox that can be hidden from us by our religious enthusiasm. Perhaps indeed this was the problem with the scribe: he was not a follower but an enthusiast.

But, what does this paradox mean for us? Everything is good in the galaxy of spiritualities, but not everything is good to do. What this means simply is what St Paul means when he says that there are many gifts but only one Spirit. Since all the gifts come from the one Spirit, does that mean we are called to embrace them all, or that we may embrace them all? Not at all. St Therese of Lisieux amuses us when she says that she chooses everything, and of course in the spirit it seems to her that she rejoiced in everything because she recognised everything as coming from the Lord. But, in point of fact, she could not choose everything. She chose to be a cloistered nun; which meant that she chose a path that led not to the marriage bed go to the convent choir; not to a physical maternity with its human perimeters made literally of blood, sweat and tears, but to a spiritual maternity which only a few years years after her death would see her statue standing in what seems like almost every single Catholic church around the globe, and millions upon millions of Catholics finding in her example and her prayers a rich resource in the following of Jesus. She chose so little; and yet her fruit has been extraordinarily abundant. Humanly, she did next to nothing; spiritually, she practically bust the bank.

Everything is good, but not everything is good to do. The following of Jesus is good, but not if we're trying to follow him in a way that is wayward, or that He does not call us to. This should be a caution to us all. There is a kind of appetite that comes from religious enthusiasm which leads into a spirituality of addition; we have one devotion, but we must add another; we do one ministry but we must do another; we accept one apostolate but there is another that must be done. The great problem with such a spirituality of addition is that it leads to a spirituality of division: it divides our energies in ways that the Lord did not plan for us; it depletes us rather than renews us.

The calling of the Lord is always to embrace our gifts with the spirituality of multiplication; it is a story of loaves and fishes. We are given little but, by faith, that little can become something abundant. We must not think about this in terms that are too human. We are not all meant to bestride the world; we may only be meant to make a difference to the person next to us. What a calamity it would be for us if through religious enthusiasm and through an all-too-human embrace of our calling, we missed the realities in front of us.

Lord, I will follow you wherever you go - this should not be our prayer. But rather, Lord where are you leading me? To which question, we might have to content ourselves with the answer he gave to St Peter when St Peter inquired about St. John's destiny: What is that to thee? Follow thou me.