Follow Me
- Deacon Dan DeLuca
- Sep 28, 2022
- 6 min read
Follow Me! This is the call of Jesus to all of us: to follow him. However, following him means we do so on his terms, not ours. As we read in today’s Gospel, this can be a stumbling block for many of us. We are attached to the things of this world and freeing ourselves from those attachments is not easy. As we unpack today’s Gospel allow Jesus to reveal to you, your attachments: the things of this world that prevent you from fully answering Jesus’s call to follow him.
Would-Be Followers of Jesus
As they were going along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” But he said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Luke 9 : 57-62
Scriptural Analysis
Today’s Gospel is composed of three dialogues between Jesus and unnamed individuals. These individuals appear ready to follow Jesus, but before he welcomes them he challenges their understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ inviting them to count the costs and reckon their conflict of loyalties. We don’t see how each dialogues concludes, what choices the individuals make. Luke uses these open-ended dialogues as a way of inviting us into these stories so that we can decide how we answer them. Let’s turn and examine each dialogue.
In the first dialogue, the individual displays a great deal of zealousness towards following Jesus. This reveals something about this individual’s motives. St. Cyril of Alexandria says this shows that, “His wish was not simply to follow Christ, as so many others of the Jewish multitude did, but rather to thrust himself into apostolic honors.” No one can promote themself into that roll but rather Christ calls them. To illustrate this further, Jesus reminds the individual of the sacrifices that are involved in following him by noting that his own life is that of a homeless man. A disciple of Christ should be prepared to give up house and home. In essence, prepare to give up everything.
The second dialogue begins with Jesus calling out to the individual, “follow me,” much as he had called out to Matthew. The individual seems eager to answer the call but tells Jesus that he must first bury his father. On the surface, this seems like a valid concern. The obligation to bury one’s parents can be found in Tobit, “So he called him and said, My son, when I die, bury me.” (4:3) However, as we dig deeper we come to understand that more may be going on.
The typical custom of the time was to bury the deceased the day they died. So if the man’s father had just died, the delay would have been short. Perhaps the individual’s father was still alive and he was using this obligation as an indefinite delay: I must care for my father until he passes. Jesus’s response is to tell the individual, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.” Jesus is not referring to the physical dead but rather the spiritually dead: those who have not yet come to believe in Christ. Jesus’s call demands no delay: it must be top priority. St Basil the Great says that we must, “repudiate human obligations, however honorable they may appear, if they slow us ever so slightly in giving wholehearted obedience we owe to God.”
In the final dialogue the individual wants to say farewell to their family before following Jesus. We see in this instance a parallel to Elijah’s call of Elisha:
So he departed from there, and found Elisha the son of Shaphat, who was plowing, with twelve yoke of oxen before him, and he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and cast his mantle upon him. And he left the oxen, and ran after Elijah, and said, “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you.” And he said to him, “Go back again; for what have I done to you?” And he returned from following him, and took the yoke of oxen, and slew them, and boiled their flesh with the yokes of the oxen, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he arose and went after Eli′ah, and ministered to him. 1 Kings 19: 19-21
We see in this call that Elijah assented to Elisha’s request to say goodbye to his parents. Jesus’s call, is different. He demands that we make him our top priority. In doing this Jesus is further separating himself for the Elijah identity and saying he is greater than any of the Old Testament prophets. That greatness necessitates that our commitment to follow him must also be greater. We also have to be cautious to not answer and then be tempted to return to the world. St Cyprian tells us, “lest we return to the devil again and to the world, which we have renounced and from which we have escaped.”
These three dialogues show us what it means to be a disciple of Christ. We are not called to merely imitate Christ. Rather, we are called to enter into the very conditions of his life and ministry. This call means we sacrifice security, filial duties, and family affection.
Daily Application
Jesus calls each and everyone of us to follow him: to follow him completely and totally. That following demand we enter completely into the conditions of his life and his ministry. Two questions should arrive in our minds as we consider that call. The first is do we truly understand what that call entails? What does it meant to enter completely into his life. The second question is what are we NOT willing to give up to answer that call?
The call to follow Jesus is a radical call and thus demands a radical response. It entails that we are willing to give up everything to follow him. Material comfort, security, family and friendships, and even our very lives as we follow him all the way to the cross. For an American Catholic this can be a difficult reality to understand because, for the most part, our answering yes to Jesus’s call hasn’t demanded much from us. Certainly it may have caused some rifts with family or friends but by and large we are not excluded from the material comfort of this world. Most of us are not in danger of losing our lives because we follow Christ. However, throughout the history of the Church up until today, following Christ has meant, for many, exclusion from material comfort or even safety and security. Something as simple as going to Mass could result in death. As we enter more fully into a Post Christian world, are we willing to accept that risk to follow Christ?
This should lead us into the next question. What things are we unwilling to give up, what relationships are we willing to walk away from, in order to answer the call to follow Christ. Are we willing to lose all material wealth? Are we willing to lose friends and family. Are we willing to lay down our very life to follow Jesus. These are hard questions to answer. It can be difficult to visualize a situation in which our family or friends leave us because of our faith. It can be difficult to imagine choosing between death and Christ.
Perhaps a more practical exercise is to consider one’s last several encounters with the Sacrament of Reconciliation, with confession. What sins have you been continually confessing over and over? That can be a good place to start practicing the detachment that Christ is calling us to: giving up those attachment that, to date, have been challenging for you to set aside. Then pray, pray for the gift of detachment.
The life of a disciple of Christ is radical. We have to be willing to leave everything we know behind if we are to follow him. We then follow him to the very cross we are called to take up. In doing so, we also follow him to the glory of the resurrection that awaits. Follow him!
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