"Often people read about these encounters and extract a lesson for Christians, for us, his would-be followers. It goes something like this: “If you want to follow Jesus you must do so wholeheartedly. There is no middle ground. You cannot proclaim the good news unless you’ve left everything to live it.” If that’s the case, I don’t know how it ever gets proclaimed. If it depends on us becoming “good,” or practicing flawless nonattachment, then it doesn’t seem like it’s very good news. The followers of Christ are dense, forgetful and bumbling.
Maybe these encounters reveal more about the nature of the gospel than about the conditions necessary for discipleship. Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man? No booth can contain him. Whatever he’s up to, it’s different than making a nest or digging a hole. “Leave the dead to bury the dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Maybe the point isn’t so much “you’re not good enough, go away you pathetic failure,” but rather that what we have to do with here, the gospel, the kingdom of God, is so radically alive that anything that has to do with death distracts from it—anything that has to do with hopelessness: lifeless systems, merciless constructs, rigid, graceless standards of purity. The point isn’t that a disciple must be good enough (meet some merciless standard) in order to get approval. The point is the scandalously redemptive, unmanageably living grace of God."
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