Following the Voice

“When Jesus announced the kingdom, the stories he told functioned like dramatic plays in search of actors. His hearers were invited to audition for parts in the kingdom. They had been eager for God’s drama to be staged and were waiting to find out what they would have to do when he did so. Now they were to discover. They were to become kingdom-people themselves. Jesus, following John the Baptist, was calling into being what he believed would be the true, renewed people of God.” – N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus, pg. 43

Almost ten years ago, I began to hear echoes of Voice calling me into a life I really knew nothing about. At first, I thought the Voice was drawing me into a deeper experience of God and communion with him. Later, I was challenged to rethink my ideas about church – how the church was structured, pastoral leadership, and the utter lack of authentic community. But the Voice did not stop there. In fact, I began to see how my understanding of the gospel was entirely focused on death; that it was doing a decent job of making me feel secure that I would go to heaven when I died, but was woefully inadequate to prepare myself or others for life in the now.

However, the Voice was not just trying to improve my spiritual health, or help me plant a healthy church, or to have a better theology. All these things matter, but are not the essence of the call, the whisper of what I began to hear almost a decade ago. It is for this reason that I often get frustrated with discussions on the internet or among church leaders about the next new theological insight, or brilliant church model, or spiritual gimmick that is sweeping Christendom. Some of it is interesting; most of it bores me to tears. That is only because I have kept hearing the Voice all these years say the same thing over and over……Come, Follow Me.

When Jesus called the disciples with these words, they could not have possibly been able to comprehend the magnitude of their decision to actually respond. They were certainly aware that they would be alienating themselves from family members, walking away from jobs and the security of a day’s wage, and understood the hazards of joining anything that smelled of messianic aspirations. In truth, they were - quite literally - signing their own death warrants. However, they could not have expected that Jesus would throw them this curveball…that they were becoming the new Israel, God’s people reconstituted around Jesus and what he was about to do.

We often miss how God has placed us in a Grand Story, one that finds its source miles upstream in the mountains with Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, then bursts out of the hills in the Promised Land; constricts to nothing more than a thin gully in Babylon, then somehow wanders its way into the valley through Jesus; widens to an earth-shaping river as the Gospel is proclaimed to the nations, and continues to move the earth today. We miss the enormity of our decision to follow Jesus. As if following Jesus was to be placed alongside deciding between Honda or Toyota for our next minivan, or if we should take that job in California. It just doesn’t mean anything to us Americans. Bonhoeffer was right in saying there is a cost to discipleship, but it isn’t just the cost that we have difficulty estimating. We radically underestimate the history behind our decision. When the gospel is reduced to your own personal salvation so you don’t go to hell when you die, why bother with history? “Who cares what happened before Jesus? That Old Testament is a good read in places, but honestly, why waste too much time there? Jesus’ blood is all we need!” Dallas Willard calls this vampire Christianity, and for good reason.

But the history of God’s people does matter, because the words “Come, Follow me” don’t make much sense without it. Follow who? A moralist teaching non-violence, self-denial, peace, and love? A bizarre lost-soul wandering the countryside spouting off nonsense about the end of the world? Or a superhuman god-man virtually nailing himself to the cross in order to ransom mankind from the bonds of sin and death, Hallelujah!

The Story matters, because unless we see how we fit as actors in his Kingdom drama, all this blabbering about church and discipleship and mission are an absurd waste of time. Without the proper context, we are simply messing around with church models and preparing for a good death. I don’t imagine the disciples would have been very excited if Jesus told them, “Come, follow me…so we can sit around in the upper room arguing about eschatology and the interpretation of Daniel 7.”

The Way of Jesus has been gnawing at me lately, like a hunger that comes on you suddenly when you’ve been preoccupied working on a project. Something tells me, you must stop and eat, but I keep right on working. Peter, James, John, and their buds did not keep working…they left their nets, or their tax collector booth, or their cushy, religious institutional job…and followed. They did not, as we will not, fully comprehend their decision. But they held nothing back, and as their Master once said, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Gee whiz, that’s not a comfortable thought for a Tuesday afternoon.