When they had brought their boats to shore, they left
everything and followed him. (Luke 5:11)
It is one of those many New
Testament narrative pictures which requires our gifts of imagination, however
unused they may normally be. Literalism,
naivete, credulity will never get it. I
can remember, as a youth, wondering how realistic it actually was – these
Galilean men, hovering always just above the poverty line, needing to earn
livelihoods to house and feed their families and themselves, men with skills
and responsibilities, suddenly now dropping it all to follow Jesus. Occasionally we have encountered someone who did
exactly that… I knew a trained nurse who chose to go off more or less penniless
to an Asian country to bring people to Jesus.
They didn’t want to be brought to Jesus.
In about six months she was back, disillusioned, defeated and ill.
We now know that God honours the
life we already have, where we are, with its achievements, failures and
commitments. Our understanding of
Christian vocation and the call of Christ is that it will be, most likely, or
at any rate will start, within the life we are living. Our discipleship will be exercised and grow in situ.
When I made a bright-eyed decision to become a minister, and show the
world what ministers should be like, I was working as a journalist. My first action was to write to my uncle, a
minister in the USA, to announce to him this important news. He replied, “I get a little tired of youngsters
who don’t know much, announcing I’m now going
to be a real Christian -- I’ll become a minister…! Years later when a whole class of us
finally qualified and graduated from theological college, and were about to go
forth and be ordained, the acerbic and wonderful Principal of the Theological
Hall addressed us. Gentlemen, he said, I beg
you, do not delude yourselves that the church and the world have been waiting
with bated breath for this moment.
So, what did Peter and Andrew,
James and John, really do back then in response to Jesus? Certainly, it looks as though they didn’t do
much fishing, any more. It does look as
though they became fulltime disciples in Jesus’s company – which we now are
learning was much wider and more varied than just those twelve men. Then, as the church tells it, they became
apostles who witnessed around the world to the resurrection and the life. But the fact is, most people whose hearts
became captive to Christ worked it out and lived it right where they were – and
they still do. The primary shift in us
is not geographic, or irresponsible. It happens
over the years ahead in our inmost being, where we are most ourselves, where
love is born and sometimes can die, the most deeply sensitive part of us God
knows and loves, the place Jesus called where
your treasure is.
That is the door we open in
Christian Meditation. It is safe to open
the door in the silence and stillness, and in the company of sometimes very
different people doing much the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment