Vocation and beauty

 An audio version of today's gospel and blog (memorial of St Dominic) can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 57-62) relates Jesus’ answers to those who say they will follow Him, and to one whom He asks to follow Him. Answering the former, He speaks directly to their hesitation, for each says, I will follow you… and yet there is a “but”, spoken or unspoken, within their offers. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head, Jesus tells the first. No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God, He says to another. And to the one who hesitates when Jesus Himself calls him, Jesus speaks in the starkest terms: Let the dead bury their dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God – quite a thing to say to a man who seemingly had just lost a parent.

As ever, we can easily imagine that the stories of these three would-be disciples were more complex than the gospel allows us to see. Each had walked his own path until that point; each was known intimately to Jesus, the Saviour. As for the first, we can easily imagine this lad loved his comforts, and perhaps imagined he could have his cake (whatever that was) and eat it. But neither he nor we can do so, not at least if we are intent on the following of Christ. If anyone would follow me, let him deny himself… Deny himself, not because Christianity is masochistic, but because the conundrum of our fallen race is that we always carry the seeds of our own destruction in our back pocket. We are our own worst enemies. When Chesterton asked the question: “What’s wrong with the world?” he answered it himself wryly: “I am.” So, whence come our satisfactions? Where do we wish to lay our heads? If we wish to lay them anywhere but on the breast of the Sacred Heart, then we might hear these words for ourselves also: the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Then, Jesus turned from the first volunteer to another potential disciple, issuing to him a joyous command: Follow me. Would that every one of us might hear such words from the Lord in the sense in which He intends them for us in our own lives. Follow me, be like me, model yourself on me, Jesus says. In response, would that we might make our own those words of Jesus’ other apostle Paul: to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. When the man asked first to go and bury his father, the bystanders might have raised an eyebrow at Jesus’ savage observation: Let the dead bury their dead. Was the man not observing the Fourth Commandment? How could the Rabbi urge him not to do so? As we have already said, there is something else going on here in for this individual, and the gospel does not reveal it to us. We can only speculate. Perhaps it was not true, and Jesus knew it. After all, what Jewish son in mourning was likely to be found wandering the highways, following a crowd, and listening to a popular preacher. Let us be realistic here and observe that Let the dead bury their dead might in fact have been a kinder response to the man’s excuse than Liar, liar pants on fire. Not everyone who expresses an apparently pious wish is as intent on piety as they would like to appear. The desire expressed before the world – the desire we express before ourselves - is not necessarily the reality.

We find the same holds true for the third person also. He only wanted to go home and say goodbye before heading off to the hills with Jesus, didn’t he? Don’t go off with strangers and tell someone where you are going are fairly sound principles of prudent conduct. And yet, here again, Jesus saw through the superficial piety, and wiped its gaudy makeup off the man’s face for him. No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Why did this man speak up and offer to follow Jesus? Why did the first man do likewise? We can only speculate on their attempts at heroism. Maybe they thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe they thought it was the impressive thing to do. Maybe they were taken by enthusiasm. Maybe they were jealous of the closeness of the apostles to the Lord. Maybe they imagined there was some other advantage to be had. But, in reality, Jesus was not content with their surface-level offers. Jesus knows the human heart and reads it like a book.

While none of us is intrinsically bad, we are all intrinsically complex, whereas the calling that the Lord gives all of us is, for the most part, radically simple: follow me. It is not too hard or too challenging for us: it is simply too simple for us. The closer we are to God, the simpler we become, the less we are a laminated mess of conflicting desires, complicated by strands of acquired behaviour, heavy gloss coats of bad habit, and suppurating scabs on wounds unhealed, sometimes by our own neglect.

 Jesus’ apparently brutal responses to these generous offers of would-be followers were not hyperbolic; they were medicinal. They were mirrors into which the would-be followers could gaze … if they dared. For sometimes the Lord teaches us by inviting us to gaze upon His own beautiful face, and sometimes He teaches us by making us confront the ugliness of our own, made uglier still by every lie we tell ourselves. For it is only on this journey that our own beautify – the beauty to which He calls us and not the kind that we grab for – can be rediscovered and restored.