From Bishop Peter Carrell
Disciples are all kinds of people
Ever since Dietrich Bonhoeffer published a book on discipleship which became very famous, ‘The Cost of Discipleship‘ (a 1959 English translation of a 1937 German original) there has been a risk that in our modern era, we think talk of ‘discipleship’ or ‘being a disciple of Jesus’ is something for an elite group of Christians. Not so. Discipleship is about everyone who follows Jesus in their daily lives, however fitfully or fruitfully, whether or not at great cost.
When we read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, we are frequently presented with some outstanding disciples of Jesus who follow Jesus in costly ways: Peter learns painful lessons, Stephen and James the brother of John are martyred, Paul and his companions are subject to riots, stoning and imprisonment. We are constantly reminded of them and their stories of costly discipleship because they have become our named saints and many of our churches are named after them. But a closer reading of the Gospels and Acts reveals that disciples are all kinds of people in a wide variety of life situations.
Women were disciples as well as men, something Luke highlights in Luke 8:1-3 and in the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). While the ‘famous’ disciples like Peter, Andrew, James and John left homes and businesses to follow Jesus, most people Jesus encountered in his travels were sent back to their own homes and villages to share the news of Jesus there. Some disciples lived in the background of things, fairly anonymous, such as Joseph of Arimathea who only comes to the foreground of Jesus’s story to bury him, or Nicodemus who only visits Jesus at night-time. Whole families became disciples of Jesus: Mum, Dad, children, household servants exemplified in the dramatic story of the Philippian jailer (Acts 15:29-34). Outsiders to mainstream Israel (from whom the first followers of Jesus were drawn) became disciples. Some examples are the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30), the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at Jacob’s well (John 4), Zacchaeus the tax collector (Luke 19:1-10), and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40).
Whatever our life situation, whoever we are in relation to the mainstream of society, whether we have been brought up in the Christian faith, or are completely new to Christianity, every one of us is invited to follow Jesus. How we follow Jesus – by continuing as we are, by changing occupation, by shifting to a new context – matters not. What matters is that we walk in Jesus’s steps, according to his teaching and his call on our lives. Disciples are all kinds of people in many different kinds of life situations.
+Peter.