“Follow me”. What is Jesus the
Christ calling us into? Are we to follow him to some location? Are we to follow
him into the religion called Christianity with its rituals, belief system,
moral code? I don’t think so. He had nothing to do with the formation of that
tradition—it didn’t exist when he was walking the earth. Now, don’t get me
wrong. Our tradition can be part of
a wonderful spiritual journey. What I am simply pointing out is that you can be
what is called a “good Christian”—take part in the rituals, adhere to its moral
code, and believe its stories—and still be missing the mark—still not answering
the call—because that tradition, those
traditions, in and of themselves, will not take you where the Christ is. After
all, what we call Christianity is inseparable from western culture—it is
inseparable from the protestant work ethic, consumerism, our notions of good
and bad, etc. i.e., it is part of the old pattern, it is, for many of us, part
of our conditioning, part and parcel of what early Christians called the old self.
So, what do those words, “follow
me”, mean? With those words we are
being called into the kind of relationship with God that Jesus had—if
the world’s 2 billion Christians had truly followed Jesus into that, the world wouldn’t look
like it does. In plain English, when the Christ says “follow me”, we are called
into a new, higher, consciousness. But we are not only being called into
something, we are also being called out of something. That is really what a church truly is: the Greek word we translate
as church is ecclesia—which means called out and to. When the divine
calls us we are called out of one thing
and into another. Both of our readings today are about answering the
call—hearing the voice of the divine as it says, pay attention, follow me.
As I have mentioned before,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a person, he calls that
person to die”. Bonhoeffer was a theologian with an exquisite understanding of
scripture—and it is my opinion that he nailed it there. But what does this
mean—“Follow me, and die?” Literal, physical death? No. Although, under extreme
circumstances it has cost people their lives. But really what “Follow me” means
is “follow me” and die to the old self, the old person, the old consciousness. In
the earliest Christian letters—we hear language like, take off the old self and put on the new self. That is first
century Christian speak for moving out of one stage of consciousness and into a
new higher stage. What did the early Christians mean when they talked about
living in this new consciousness, this new Christian life? First of all, it is
a radical change of direction, his
disciples left their jobs and their homes—in fact in Mark we hear they left
all to follow Christ. This
can stand for all who follow Christ, for to follow Christ means to be called
out of the old pattern, to discard the
old pattern, and when we discard the old pattern we stop being what we were
conditioned to be, we stop being what
the culture or society is: acquisitive, competitive, ambitious, and
power-seeking. First century Roman controlled Palestine was this way and
our consumerist culture certainly is. To help us understand what discipleship
meant, to help us understand what discarding the old pattern meant for Jesus and
his first disciples we can turn to some often ignored scripture. First Luke
14:26, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and
children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple”.
Obviously, this does not mean that we are to literally hate our family of
origin or life itself. But, what it does mean is that we must see, and
understand, our conditioning, our conditioned selves. We must see, objectively,
where and who we come from if we are to transcend or lose the old self, the old
pattern, which the Christ is calling us out of. Matthew 10:34 also speaks of
this requirement for discipleship. “Do not think that I have come to bring
peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have
come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a
daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of
one’s own household.” What? What is he talking about? Remember, the church is
called out…again this is a harsh statement meant to grab our attention. This is
about being called out of one’s comfort zone. We are being called out of our old self—and the roots of our old self,
our old pattern, are in the conditioning we receive through the family and the
society. Follow me, I am calling you out…I am asking you to leave behind the
authority that the old self is bound by. If we don’t leave that behind we remain too self-centered to love
selflessly as the Christ did. This is the whole point—for us to be able to love
as the Christ did—a person who emptied himself of all ego.
As I said earlier, of course we are not
literally meant to dislike or even ignore our family—I know plenty of people
that have run away from their families—only to still be controlled by their
childhood experiences. This is about truly being free, not being bound by our
early experiences, as well as our self-defensive reaction to them; this is
about being free in Christ as Paul
said. This freedom is the Good News of the Christ.
When have you been called out of
the old way of living—out of the old self—out of your old pattern? When has
Christ called you? When has Christ asked your old self to die for him? How does
an old self die? How do we follow the Christ into the unknown? I have come to
see that the Christ is always
saying “Follow me”. BECAUSE, THE CHRIST IS ALWAYS HERE, IN
EACH NEW UNFOLDING MOMENT—WE ARE CALLED. All of this informs our
reading from John today.
In that text, Jesus says to Philip,
“Follow me”. And then we hear Philip say to Nathanael, “Hey, we have found the
one written about in our tradition”. In other words, we have found the Christ,
the bringer of a new reality—the one that infinitely transcends our tradition—even
while it points toward him. And Nathanael is skeptical—he asks, “Can anything
good come out of Nazareth?” To this Philip says, “Come and see”. This is what we all must do. We must tell
others of our experience of the Christ—and we must tell them, “Come and
see”—you must see this for yourself. You must see that right here, right now,
there is, in the midst of all this consumerism, all this race and class
division, all this conflict, all this self-centeredness
and competition, there is a New Reality that we have been called
into—we really do have good news—but you
must experience this for yourself. We
have been called out of the old reality and into the new…come and see!
In verses 47 through 51 we witness
a strange encounter between Nathanael and Jesus. Nathanael is a disciple that
only appears in John. And some scholars believe he is intended to be a
representation of Paul. So Jesus sees Nathanael approaching and says that he is
an Israelite without deceit. What
does that mean? The Greek word dolos
points to one that enters into
relationships to satisfy his or her own selfish needs. Jesus is saying that Nathanael is someone that is free of this kind of
self-centeredness. And then we find out why. We hear that Jesus started
working in Philip’s life while Philip was sitting under the fig tree. This
phrase “sitting under the fig tree” is a synonym for the place where Rabbis
studied the Torah (Spong). We are hearing that Nathanael is free of this
self-centeredness because Jesus has already known him or called him. Nathanael has been called out of his
religion of origin—called out of his familial and cultural conditioning—and
called into freedom, called into life in Christ.
In verse 51 we hear remarkable language—language that points toward this
amazing new life. We hear that Nathanael will see the heavens opened. In other
words, we hear that Nathanael will have the same experience of God that Jesus
himself had at his baptism. Nathanael has been called out of the old self and
into a new consciousness—a Christ consciousness, a consciousness beyond
self-centeredness and the fear and greed that accompanies it. That is what our
tradition refers to as being born again or eternal life. Now that, is good
news.
We are the ecclesia, we are
being called out. Jesus is always standing before us saying “follow me”. Will
we go with him? Let it be so.
