Our Real Motives
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The leader of the adult Lenten study course asked the class, “Who wants to read Luke 9: 57 to 62?”
“I will,” one woman said, and read aloud, ”Someone said to Jesus, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’
“And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but [I] have nowhere to lay [my] head.’
“To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’
“But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’
“Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me say farewell to those at my home.’
“Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’”
A thoughtful discussion followed this reading.
It came out that one of the members of the group who felt on the brink of old age regretted having dropped out of college because the beckoning paycheck looked more attractive.
He applied the looking-back clause to this long-ago action of his own.
The conversation turned to another aspect of the Scriptural reading. Several had been puzzled and even a little bit put off by Jesus’s apparently casual dismissal of the one man’s mention of the need to go and bury his father.
No one in the class thought that this sounded like something Jesus would be likely to say. Could he actually have meant what his statement seems to mean: A son not fulfilling his duties to his dead father?
A helpful footnote made the point that more than likely, the father was alive and well. The son was saying in effect, “I will wait till my father dies and then I’ll follow you.”
Another footnote also helped: The scholar said, “Jesus often gave commands in light of the person’s real motive.”
In the case of the first would-be follower, his enthusiasm to follow Jesus “wherever he went” disappeared when Jesus told it like it was regarding the comforts he could expect—none.
We don’t hear another word out of him.
Perhaps he had thought there was something glamorous about the life he thought he saw Jesus living, or perhaps he liked the idea of living in the limelight of all the attention, the fascinated crowds, the stories that circulated.
The second man seemed to think that discipleship and proclaiming the kingdom of God were things one could pick up and put down whenever it was convenient, like knitting or whittling.
He was probably well aware than if Jesus would accept his open-ended timetable for discipleship, he could be off the hook indefinitely.
The last man to speak without serious thought was in reality even less ready to follow Jesus than the others.
“I want to say good-bye to my family.”
We can understand this; we don’t lightly walk out on our families.
Yet I can see Jesus doing what he did when confronted with another half-hearted follower, “Jesus, looking at the young man, loved him.” (Mark 10: 17-31.)
In both cases, Jesus knew that their long-term best spiritual interests lay in leaving behind all other satisfactions and following him. He knew that they had some hidden agenda and was able to read their real motives.
Jesus wants true followers but not if we make important promises without counting the cost.
Impulsive declarations of devotion and conviction do not serve the Kingdom of God in fruitful ways.
“The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4: 23-24.)
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
