What Jesus says to Andrew and the other disciple of the Baptist in today's Gospel he says to all who would follow him: "Come and you will see." Being a Christian means being a follower of a way. As Christians, we insist on being followers of the Way inasmuch as we have experienced Christ as the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Following Jesus is dynamic and moving, not static and stationary. To point out something obvious, he didn't summon the two followers of the Baptist to the nearest rock and urge them to sit down.
Our readings today follow last Sunday's celebration of the Baptism of the Lord. Front-to-back and side-to-side, these readings are about vocation. A vocation is a calling. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ calls you to follow him. At root, there is only one call: follow Christ. You received this call at your baptism. It was strengthened by a special sacramental outpouring of the Holy Spirit when you were confirmed. Following Christ is the primary vocation of every Christian.
You must discern how to follow Christ by considering what state of life he calls you to live. What is meant by "state of life"? Well, do you have a vocation to marriage, with its implicit call to parenthood? Are you called to live a single life, allowing you to devote yourself to God in this way? Are you called to participate in the charism of a particular religious order and fully live the evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty, and obedience? Both ordained and laypeople can belong to religious orders. Most of the ordained belong to the "secular" clergy, meaning they do not belong to a religious order but are called to serve the local Church under the authority of the bishop.
Finally, how you earn your living, support yourself and, if married, your family is also something you should prayerfully consider. If your state of life as described above is your secondary vocation, this might be called your tertiary vocation. The manner in which you live your life should not only be directed toward bringing others to Christ but, by the Spirit's power, bringing Christ to others. The best way to bring Christ to others is through service, what in the New Testament is called diakonia. It gets back to that oft-used quote, probably not uttered by Saint Francis but certainly smacking of the Franciscan charism: Today preach the Gospel and if you have to use words."
Christians follow a person, not a set of ideas or rules let alone a ready-made ideology be it of the right or the left. If you truly follow Jesus, he will challenge your preconceptions, disabuse you of your smug certainties, and invite you to engage reality with love and intense desire. Even though Andrew, Peter's brother, and the other disciple (usually considered to be John) seem to recognize Jesus as the Christ right-away and set out to follow him, they have no idea of the journey on which they're about to embark. Following Jesus is nothing if not an adventure.
God, as Pope Francis has noted more than once, is "the God of surprises." This is so, the Holy Father insists, "because he is a living God, a God who abides in us, a God who moves our heart, a God who is in the Church and walks with us; and he always surprises us on this path" (from Homily for Daily Mass 8 May 2017). If you don't believe this, ask your pastor to tell you the story of his vocation, or a religious sister of your acquaintance why she decided for foresake all and follow Jesus more closely, or ask a Christian couple you know and hold in high regard how they met and decided to marry each other. You'll hear about a lot of surprises!
When the disciples of the Baptist ask Jesus where he is staying, the Lord invites them to come and see. Yet, despite conveying that they spent the rest of the day with him, the inspired author never indicates a specific place. In other words, just where Jesus was staying is never disclosed. Nowhere can be separated into now here. It seems that after he left Nazareth, Jesus had no fixed location, no home to speak of. The point, it seems to me, is that to follow Jesus is to be on the way. The Second Vatican Council described the Church as a Pilgrim People, a people on the way (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [Lumen Gentium], Chapter VII).
Jesus keeps us from settling for less than that for which we are made. In his book The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis put it like this:
Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.Once you are baptized, confirmed, and come into communion, you are incorporated into Christ's very Body, the Church. Hence, as Saint Paul tells the Christians of ancient Corinth, "you are not your own" (1 Cor 6:19). This doesn't mean that you give up your agency, your freedom, your ability to chose. It means that your encounter with Jesus has changed your life. This change of life is called "repentance," in Greek metanoia. The way of Jesus is the path of true freedom.
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