“Come and follow me”

The Gospel ideal is not, solely or primarily, a body of doctrine to be adopted, but Someone to be followed. To follow means learning to think, act, and live with Him and like Him. And this Someone is not a man of half-measures or compromises. He is a man of single-minded love, and He asks no less of His disciples, “No one,” He says, “can serve two masters.” (Mt 8:24). He knows how to be patient—”not quenching the smoldering wick” (Mt 12:20)—yet He makes no compromises regarding the ideal. He accepts what is offered, but He asks for everything, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind.” (Lk 10:27) He claims not just a part, but the whole lot: the total gift of intellect, heart, will, and life.

A true disciple of Christ is proud to serve such a Master, whose love is so demanding. He would be the first to ask this of Him, “And above all, Lord, be uncompromising. Do not allow me to take back any part of my offering or to indulge in the slightest diversion; do not tolerate my ever giving You anything less than everything.“

If Christ asks for everything, it is because He is the first to give everything, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for those one loves.” Intimacy between Him and His disciple is established at this level of total, mutual self-giving. Yet total self-giving implies, at the same time, renunciation.

Indeed, the Gospel is summed up in these two propositions, which are like the two sides of the same reality: giving everything and renouncing everything. In other words, to “follow” Christ and “leave” everything else behind.

One certainly cannot accuse Christ of catching us off guard. He is not the kind of preacher who sugarcoats demanding truths, only to slip them back in later. He states plainly what He thinks and what He is doing, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother…” (Mt 10:34-36) He reiterates this same demand in equally blunt terms, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Lk 14:25-33). Of course, “hating” here does not mean “wishing harm upon others,” but rather—when necessary—rejecting them if they position themselves as rivals to God or as obstacles on the path to holiness. This does not, however, prevent us from loving them enough to lay down our lives for them! Christ himself gives us an example of this holy hatred: one day, Peter tries to dissuade him from the sacrifice of the Cross. Christ rebukes him indignantly, “Get behind me, Satan.”

And when Christ adds, “Whoever does not renounce everything,” he is certainly not inviting us to stop loving; rather, he wants us to understand that we must not be held captive by our loves—whether for others or for ourselves—and that for his disciple, there is only one way to love: to love for the sake of loving Him.

You have to admit, our Master does not mince His words! Yet, it is essential that we truly grasp his message. “Leaving,” “hating,” “tearing away”—these words must be understood in their strongest sense; that is, in the spiritual sense.

It is precisely these demands that, for twenty centuries, have bound to Him those generous souls incapable of giving themselves only halfway. “They brought their boats to land and left everything to follow Him,” it is said of Peter and Andrew (Luke 5:11). And Saint Paul, a few years later, could write, “Whatever advantages I once had, I have come to regard as disadvantages because of Christ. More than that, I now consider everything a disadvantage compared to the surpassing gain of knowing and loving Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have accepted the loss of all things; I regard everything as rubbish, in order to gain Christ.” (Phil 3:4–9).

This is the Gospel ideal. Whatever one’s state of life, it remains binding—for married people just as for others. There is no “discount” Christian life for the faint-hearted.

In and through their love, a man and a woman can and must therefore attain a total gift of oneself to Jesus Christ. It is to enable them to realise this ideal that the Lord made marriage a sacrament—that is, a human reality inhabited and transformed by divine Charity, which, like a powerful leaven, enables spouses to achieve what seems impossible to man, but is possible to God.

Henri Caffarel, Lettre mensuelle des Équipes Notre-Dame, November 1962