When someone wants you to do something or buy something they provide a positive spin to entice you. Join our gym and in six weeks you’ll have washboard abs. Take this pill and your memory will improve so much that you’ll remember what you ate for breakfast. If you watch this video (available for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling) your income will double in just one year. You see this particularly in the ads urging you to enlist in the military. Join the Navy and see the world. Enroll in the US Army and Be All You Can Be. It can be quite a shock when things are not quite as easy as advertised. Seeing the world with the Navy requires swabbing acres of decks, battening down the hatches and anchors aweigh. And to be all you can be in the Army you’ve got drills to learn, miles of hikes, hours on guard duty, and dozens of shoes to polish. They don’t mention that in the recruitment posters.
Does the same thing happen in the spiritual life? Jesus provides great incentives when doing his recruiting. “Follow me and I will make you fishers of others.” “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and you will find rest for your soul.” “Whoever is my disciple will receive one hundred times more houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and land now, and in the age to come eternal life (Mark 10:30). Pretty good package – but following Jesus does not always work out smoothly. Where’s my hundredfold? If we stopped at this point we could join the lament of the prophet Jeremiah: “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped.” The Hebrew word translated as “duped” here has several other meanings that might be what the prophet meant. “You deceived me, O Lord.” “You beguiled me, O Lord.” Or even “You seduced me, Oh Lord.” All those meanings underlie the Hebrew original. The point of the prophetic comment seems to be: O God, you made many promises. Why is this so hard? Why am I having such a difficult time?
However, when giving his recruitment pitch Jesus does not limit himself to the positives. He includes the (seeming) negatives as well. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny themselves and take up their cross. Whoever wishes to save their lives will lose them.” Or as St. Paul puts it writing after a generation of Christians have followed Jesus: “Offer you bodies as a living sacrifice.” No being duped about what the life of a disciple is like in those words. Jesus lets us know that following him is not cheap grace. Yes, following Jesus is an invitation to joy but it includes the challenge of conversion. Following Jesus provides a mission worth giving your life for but also involves at times surrendering your plans. Following Jesus brings you into close contact with others but it also brings you into close contact with others if you catch my drift.
When Jesus calls us to follow him he asks to be clear-eyed in our discipleship. No being duped or deceived. We have learned and are learning the glories and the crosses which happen when following Jesus. A spiritual life can only be called a bed of roses when we understand that the thorns inflict many a stab and a jab whenever you lie back on the petals. It is only a clear-eyed, un-duped, vision of a spiritual life that makes it possible to keep on keeping on.
