Following Jesus

In an Age of Hypocrisy

David Lowry

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725263819, 9781725263772
• eBook ISBN: 9781725263802
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We live in a time when many view the church as a relic of ancient traditions and cosmologies, often reactionary, mean-spirited, nationalist, and racist. They see those who call themselves Christians reacting in fear to the changes around them, rather than, like Jesus, boldly declaring and living out God's compassion and justice. Some, who view themselves as nonbelievers, point out, often with great clarity, the distance between so-called Christian witness and the teaching of Jesus. This book takes us back to the first followers of Jesus and their attraction to Jesus and his teaching. It reexamines what they encountered in Jesus that led them to follow him, and it analyzes the dynamics of following. This exploration becomes a call to let Jesus lead us into God's presence and liberating action. By doing so, we experience a stripping away of our false religiosity, misplaced commitments, and idolatries. As we join with others in a community of Jesus's followers, gathered by Jesus to be sent out, we exercise true, society-altering witness.

1

The Desire to Follow

“As a deer longs for flowing streams so my soul longs for you, O God.”

Psalm 42:1

Why did Peter and Andrew, James and John, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Salome, and the other disciples want to follow Jesus? What was there about Jesus that drew them to him, that brought forth a desire to follow and kept them following?

Jesus did not promise them prosperity, certainly not along the lines of made-for-TV prosperity preachers. He did not place wealth, health, and wisdom at the center of his teaching, nor did he live what we generally consider a prosperous lifestyle. Like John the Baptist, Jesus did not hang around the wealthy and powerful. After John’s death, Jesus asked those who came out to see John, “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?” Did you go to see “someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces.”

Like John, Jesus was not found in centers of power but out in the wilderness or going from town to town. When we consider the names of the towns that Jesus visited, they were small. Nazareth, his home town was small. Maybe two hundred people lived there.1 During the years of his ministry, he made his home in Capernaum, another small town, on the shores of Galilee. Capernaum was only ten miles from Tiberias, the capital city of Galilee, where King Herod Antipas had his royal palace, but there is no mention of Jesus going there. He did not cozy up to power. He did not attempt to get close to King Herod or to the world’s powerful, as if they had something to offer him. Jesus came with his own authority and power, as one who had something to give—giving from what he was daily receiving. So he was often with needy people, who knew they were needy: the blind, the lame, the brokenhearted, the emotionally and mentally ill.

The only time we read of Jesus going to a major city, a place of power and prestige, was when he went to Jerusalem. There he confronted and called out the Judean leadership. Chapter 23 of Matthew gives us a sense of the threat he posed to the political order, given what he said to them. (“Woe to you hypocrites.” “Woe to you blind guides.” “You are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.”) He was brought by angry leaders to stand before King Herod and then Pilate, the Roman governor, to whom he was presented as a danger to Rome, with the accusation that he was a treacherous usurper who made himself out to be king of the Jews. As he had prophesied to his disciples, he was then executed, dying the death of a subversive.

So, why did these disciples want to follow Jesus? What did they desire? There were those, at that time, who anticipated the redemption of Israel and associated the liberation of their nation with an anointed one (a messiah2), a son of David. There were those who imagined the reestablishing of the kingdom that God promised to David and his descendants. They looked for Mount Zion, upon which sat the temple, to be lifted up as the highest of the mountains to which all the nations of the world would come and worship the God of Israel and all creation.3 But in the disciples’ initial encounter with Jesus, that scenario was likely more than they could have envisioned, except as a hopeful possibility.4 At the least, they initially saw in Jesus a teacher, prophet, and healer.

Before Jesus came to Peter, James, and John on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and called them to follow him, they must have had some experience with Jesus. Jesus had made his home in Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee and he ministered in that area, sometimes in the town, sometimes out in deserted places, sometimes in his home. We are also given the impression, in Matthew and Luke, that Peter’s house was in Capernaum.5 And Luke implies that Jesus had a relationship with Simon Peter prior to calling him. Jesus was in Peter’s house, healing his mother-in-law, prior to telling him that “from now on you will be catching people,” and prior to Peter leaving everything to follow him.6 Peter and his companions heard Jesus speak and saw him heal before they received the call to follow. Above all, they heard Jesus proclaim the nearness of God’s reign and call people to make themselves ready to receive God’s reign.

Clearly, Jesus’ message concerning God’s reign was central to his identity. So, how did Jesus’ followers understand the proclamation that the kingdom of God had come near? They likely understood God’s kingdom in earthly terms, that Israel would be free from the occupation of Rome, that the temple on Mount Zion would be filled with God’s presence, and that Israel would become a light to all nations. After all, James and John at one point desired to be made second to Jesus when he came into his kingdom—revealing a politically typical view of the nature of kingdoms. That the kingdom was near, that the waiting was almost over, that the kingdom was neither far in time or space must have brought great hope, no matter whatever way they envisioned God’s kingdom. That God reigns, of course, was in keeping with what they knew of God from their Scriptures as the source and center of all, the ruler of all, the one we are to love with our whole being, serve, trust, and obey.7

However they may have initially understood God’s reign, what we see in these potential followers was a desire for God’s presence and action in their lives and the lives of their people. They wanted God to reign. They desired a world where God had dominion instead of evil, instead of Satan. They desired the life they saw in Jesus: the compassion, the truth, the authority over evil and disease. God was powerfully present in Jesus, and they desired that presence. They encountered, in Jesus, powerful compassion, mercy, and truth. God’s will was being done through Jesus. It was something beautiful to behold, and they wanted to be included in that reality.

They desired to follow Jesus because, in the words of the Gospel of John, he had “the words of eternal life.”8 They wanted what he had. They needed what he had to give. They saw the intimacy that he had with God; he called God “father.” They saw the way Jesus prayed and its importance in his life, and they asked him to teach them how to pray. They desired the kind of relationship Jesus had with God. That is still why potential followers come to have a desire to follow Jesus.

It was not Jesus’ politics, principles, or ethical stance that attracted them. It was God. It was about getting near to someone who experiences God, who exercises authority that comes from God, and who operates by the power of God to bring healing and liberation. Theirs was the most fundamental human desire, to be one with the source of their lives and live from that reality and to experience that reality in the world.

Many of us, who have been exposed to Jesus through church confessio...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Desire to Follow
• Chapter 2: The Decision to Follow
• Chapter 3: The Act of Following
• Chapter 4: The Identity of the Follower
• Chapter 5: Following Love
• Chapter 6: The Gathering of Followers
• Chapter 7: Following the Crucified and Risen One
• Chapter 8: Witness in An Age of Hypocrisy
• Bibliography