NOTES for Luk 9:57-62
The Lord Jesus Christ's replies to the words of three people who come to Him expressing a desire to follow Him often leave the reader troubled. Why, instead of welcoming new followers, does the Lord in effect reject them and expose something in their desire to follow Him? This question is often prompted by our own fears: we are afraid that He might also reject our desire to follow Jesus. In any case, Christ's words in today's reading from Luke's Gospel shock us; they contradict certain deeply hidden assumptions of ours. Sometimes we even feel resentful towards the evangelist: without this passage, everything would be much smoother and more pleasant for us.
We should probably distinguish three main reasons for this attitude towards these words of Christ. First, our habitual, stereotyped ideas may be wrong. Second, we may not understand what the Lord is saying. And third, perhaps we are applying to everyone, including ourselves, what is being said to quite specific people for quite specific reasons. In this case, all three reasons seem to be at work at once.
The belief that the Lord will not cast out anyone who comes to Him is based on His own words. Yet He Himself also says that not everyone who calls Him ‘Lord’ can enter into life, but only the one who does the will of the heavenly Father. God, then, is not a politician whose aim is popularity at any price. Only someone with a certain purity of intention can follow Him. Probably, whenever we seek God, there is some corruption in our motives; in certain cases, however, it makes our coming to Christ—not impossible, no—but ruinous for us ourselves. Such are the three examples given by the evangelist. One person, attracted by the glory of the messianic Kingdom, wants to share in it, but the Lord speaks of His path as one of rejection and suffering. The second and third want to follow Christ on their own terms: ‘I will follow You, but...’ they say. Here the person determines his own path and tries to do God a kind of favour by agreeing to follow Him. All these things are far from spiritually harmless, as the Lord Jesus' replies point out.
Clearly, the first reason for our rejection of Christ's words is directly linked to the third: we should not apply His answers to these three people to the whole world. For them not to apply to us, we need only avoid repeating these people's mistakes.
And finally, we really do need to grasp the essence of what the Lord wishes to say. To the first of the three people mentioned He is, in effect, speaking about the Cross. It is important that suffering on the Cross and rejection by people appear here as the Lord Jesus' constant companions throughout His earthly journey, from the cave at Bethlehem to Golgotha. It is important to hear Christ's answer to the man who does not agree to follow Him because of a most important filial duty together with the question. This man says: allow me to leave You, because something important is waiting for me somewhere out there. But there is only one place one can go on leaving God: hell, because wherever God is absent, that is hell. And Christ says to this man: no, it is from there that you need to leave and come to Me. Both question and answer are built around the verb apelauno, ‘to leave, to go away’. Where Christ is absent, Jesus says, there is the realm of the dead. One should leave not Christ to go there, but that place to come to Christ. You, the Lord says, go and proclaim the Kingdom. The third man, while agreeing to follow Christ, tries to reserve a certain degree of freedom for himself; perhaps, too, he is looking to boast to his loved ones about how much he has grown spiritually, now that he is leaving to follow the Teacher from Nazareth. And the Lord tells him that such double-mindedness is impossible before the face of God.
That, apparently, is why it mattered to the evangelist Luke to include these three brief dialogues in the Gospel: so that we might see a true picture of what was happening and learn something from this example.