Follow Me

Reflection on Gospel of Luke 9:51-62

In many respects Jesus was like the other rabbis of his time in Palestine. But In many other respects, he was totally unlike them. One clear difference between Jesus and the other rabbi was in the way he recruited his disciples. In those days, if anyone wanted to be a disciple of any rabbi, he simply applied to him. In other words, the disciple chose his own rabbi. The very opposite was the case with Jesus. His disciples did not choose him; he chose them. And that is just what he said in John 15: 16: "You did not choose me, no, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last…"

We see that clearly demonstrated in our Gospel passage of today. One man said to Jesus, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus did not want that man to follow him, and so he tactfully fenced him off with the excuse that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

But the same Jesus wanted two other men to follow him. So he called them to do just that. When they tried to make their own excuses, he would have none of it. He told them to simply drop whatever other agenda they had, and follow him. The meaning of that is that the following of Jesus does not admit of any excuses; it demands total commitment. It is not possible to follow Jesus by half measures; it is all or nothing. That is exactly what first disciples of Jesus did, when they left everything and followed him" (Luke 5: 11).

The Christian life is a call to discipleship, a call to follow Jesus. All of us who are baptised are beneficiaries of that call. As in the case of the early disciples of Jesus, we did not choose him; no, he chose us. That is to say, we are Christians, not because we wanted to be Christians, but only because Jesus made us so by his own deliberate choice. His reasons for choosing us are known to him alone. Whatever those reasons may be, I believe we ought to be grateful to him for choosing us.

Now that we have been chosen, we must remember that Jesus does not take any excuses. He demands total commitment of his followers. We must follow him completely with all that we are and all that we have. That is to say, we must place our very selves and all our possessions at his disposal, to do with as he pleases. That, in part, is what Jesus meant when he said, "If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23).

To follow Jesus completely also means that we shall not live or act in ways that compromise our call to discipleship, in ways that contradict our Christian faith. Our way of life and the activities we engage in must square with the faith we professed at the time of our baptism, when we rejected Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises, and said that we believed in God, the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.