“Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matt. 26-025). There is something cruel in the way that this last phrase reiterates almost word for word the narrative of the initial scenes of vocation. ‘They left everything and followed him’ (Luke 5:11). In St. Luke’s account, after the arrest, those who accompanied Jesus are not called ‘disciples’ (mathetai); later they are called by another name (the Eleven and their companions), and in the Acts of the Apostles, the expression mathetai belongs to the Church.
“The disruption of the disciples at the moment of the Passion is of decisive importance. Between Christ and his first disciples yawns the unbridgeable abyss of the Cross. There the disciples cannot follow. The end of the earthly way of Jesus is the Cross; it is his specific vocation. He alone can submit to it, solitary, bearing the burden of all. The idea of following Jesus is not to be understood as if it were a question of imitating a great man such as we might take as a model for our own life, a Ghandi, a Socrates, for example; Christ and his disciples are not on the same plane. The Cross is unique. Even if the believer of today has in some way the possibility of walking the road that took Jesus to the Cross and resurrection it is still uniquely thanks to the grace of the One risen and glorified.
“It is only after Easter that the disciples are able to follow Jesus to the end, because following Christ reveals itself as being much more profound than a simple invitation of an ethical order, or something merely exterior.”
A Carthusian, The Call of Silent Love (Gracewing 2006), 51-52.
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