DAILY GRACE
June 29, 2020, Monday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Scripture: Matthew 8:18-22
Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Another of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Meditation
“Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”
To the well-meaning scribe and potential disciple who makes the magnanimous offer to Jesus, he offers a strange response: ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Some interpret this mainly as an invitation to poverty as lived by the Master. I find it, however, still to be an intriguing response.
Note the scribe’s word: wherever, and Jesus’ word: nowhere. The scribe sees discipleship as being about location, perhaps even geographical location. He’ll go anywhere to follow Jesus. But Jesus talks about “nowhere.” Dens and nests for foxes and birds are their home bases from which they venture forth. Perhaps Jesus is saying it’s not about location, nor doing dazzling things to public acclaim.
The scribe’s locus, however, may be deeper than geography. Perhaps Jesus is addressing the I in the sentence. “I will follow you,” the scribe glibly announces. I will do it. I will accomplish it on my own power because I want to do it. I am bestowing something on you, Lord, that you should be grateful for: myself. To that Jesus says, “I have no home base. I don’t have a strategy or master plan creating around me a monument to myself. I don’t have and can’t offer anyone else the security of success, or accomplishment of any kind. In fact, I came for just the opposite: complete inner poverty and obedience to the Father. I will be emptied out in failure on the cross and buried in the tomb. Anyone who follows me must expect the same. It’s about what God desires, and his glory.”
I’ve had to learn this less of the nowhere of the Master again and again. Unexpected illness and death of a loved one, failure in pastoral work, misunderstanding . . . my list is not so different from yours. The nowhere is God’s way of deepening our life, of emptying us of ourselves, of making room for him and for our deepest happiness.
Prayer
Lord, empty me again of myself, of my self-assured discipleship that sets me up for spiritual superficiality. May I be given the grace to follow you nowhere, for without you I can accomplish nothing good, nothing of value, nothing of lasting worth. I rejoice to see my weakness, because if I turn to you in my weakness you will carry me in your strength where I could never go on my own.
Contemplation
“Teacher, may I follow you in your complete obedience to the Father.”