• One verb, and it is handed to you
• Eleven verbs of hers, two of his
• The saying that went abroad
• Follow thou me is not a ranking
• The Tuesday that stayed in the diary

One verb, and it is handed to you

Peter asks a reasonable question and does not get an answer to it.

He has just been told to follow. He turns round, sees the other disciple coming along behind, and asks what will become of that man. It is a natural question. Anybody handed a hard instruction wants to know whether the person next to them has been handed the same one.

What comes back is a sentence about the other disciple that settles nothing whatever about him, and then three words that settle everything about Peter. Christ does not say what the other disciple will do. He does not say what the other disciple is for. He says follow thou me, and the sentence stops there.

Hold on to how little information that is. Peter asked about a man and was handed a verb. It is the same verb he was handed a few seconds earlier, because the reading opens with Follow me, before he ever turned round. The instruction did not change when the comparison arrived.

It was simply given again, and the second time it carried the word thou. Follow thou me is not new information. It is the old instruction, repeated to a man who had stopped following in order to ask about somebody else.

This archive has met this chapter twice before, both times as a twelve-word antiphon at the head of a Mass, on the feast of a martyred pope in November and again on St. Damasus earlier this month. Neither of those days printed it as a Gospel. Today’s reading begins two verses further on than that antiphon, and follow thou me is where it lands.

Which means this ministry has had the commission twice over and the comparison not once. The part of the chapter this ministry has said out loud so far is the part where a man is given work. The part we reach this morning is the part immediately afterwards, where the same man tries to find out what the work is worth relative to somebody else’s, and is answered with follow thou me and nothing further.

Eleven verbs of hers, two of his

Now set the Lesson beside it, because the Lesson does the same arithmetic from the other end.

Ecclesiasticus gives the man exactly two verbs of his own and puts both of them in the first line. He will do good. He shall lay hold on her. After that the grammar changes and never changes back.

Count what Wisdom does across the five verses that follow. She meets him. She receives him. She feeds him. She gives him drink.

She holds him fast. She exalts him among his neighbours. She opens his mouth. She fills him.

She clothes him. She heaps a treasure upon him. She causes him to inherit a name.

That is eleven verbs, one subject, and the man is the object of every single one of them. His own two contributions across that whole stretch are both negative, and both of them are things that fail to happen to him: he shall not be moved, and he shall not be confounded. He is held. He does not do the holding.

So the Mass says the same thing twice over in two different registers, and follow thou me is the second saying of it. Nearly everything is done for a person. The part that is actually theirs is small, particular and singular.

And it is worth saying plainly that small is not the same as slight. Follow thou me is three words set against eleven verbs, and the three words are still the only ones in the whole Mass addressed to anybody in the room.

There is a particular relief in that arithmetic if you have ever tried to keep up with a devotion built for somebody else’s week. The Lesson does not ask the man to match Wisdom verb for verb. It does not ask him to account for the difference between eleven and two. Follow thou me does not scale with what is being done for you, and it does not scale with what is being done by anybody standing nearby.

The saying that went abroad

Then the Gospel stops and does something to its own text, and it is worth pausing on.

A rumour started. The brethren took the sentence about the other disciple and passed it round as a settled claim about that man’s future. The Gospel then breaks off its own narrative to say, flatly, that Jesus did not say that.

And then it quotes the sentence again, word for word, and lets the quotation do the correcting. The correction is not a new teaching, and it is not an argument. It is the same words read a second time with nothing added to them.

The Catholic Encyclopedia’s account of the Apostle’s own life records that he died at Ephesus about the year 100, at a great age. That is the plainest possible end to the rumour, and the Gospel had already ended it in its own way, in the very verse that reports it.

But the rumour is the interesting part, because of what it kept. What went round was a forecast about the other man and nothing else whatever. Follow thou me is not in the version that travelled at all, and follow thou me is the half of the sentence that was addressed to somebody.

That is a recognisable habit, and it did not stop in the first century. A sentence travels better when it is about a third party than when it is aimed at the person repeating it, and follow thou me is aimed squarely at the person repeating it.

Consider what the evangelist does not do about it. He does not write a rebuttal, he does not explain the sentence, and he does not soften it. He puts the words back on the page unaltered, and the comparison is left to whoever is reading. That is a slower method than argument and it is a great deal harder to misuse, because it hands the reader the original rather than a better version of it. Follow thou me survives that treatment intact, which is more than the rumour managed.

Follow thou me is not a ranking

I want to name who that habit has fallen on, because the text needs it named.

Trans people have had a great deal said about them in Christ’s name that Christ did not say. The sentences go abroad among the brethren as though Scripture had already settled the question, and the settling gets done at a distance, about a person, by people who are not speaking to them. Verse 23 is the Gospel correcting exactly that shape of speech, and the correction is available to us in the form it was given: go back and read what the sentence says, and to whom.

Apply the fruit test the way we test everything here, and point it at our own record rather than anybody else’s. A claim that went abroad because it was easier to repeat than to check has grown one particular fruit. It has grown the habit of settling a question about a person while that person is not in the conversation at all. Follow thou me is the opposite kind of speech: second person, singular, with no third party anywhere in it.

This is not the argument we made on St. Stephen’s feast, and I want to be exact about the difference. That day the question was whether a Gospel may be read as a sentence passed on a whole people. Today’s is narrower. It is whether a thing Christ did not say may be circulated as though he had said it, and follow thou me is what he did say, to one man, about that man’s own next step.

It is also worth being honest about how ordinary the mechanism is, because that is what makes it hard to stop. Verse 23 does not accuse anyone of inventing anything. A real sentence was heard, the interesting half of it travelled, and the version that arrived was wrong. Follow thou me is what fell off in transit, and follow thou me is the only part that was ever addressed to a listener.

Now the guardrail, and this morning it has two doors to shut. Nothing here says that what you do is beside the point. The first verse of the Lesson is the man’s own, Peter is handed an instruction rather than a chair, and follow thou me is a working verb.

And nothing here turns anybody’s life into a test case. Disabled and chronically ill people get graded against a standard course of devotion that other bodies can keep and theirs cannot, and this Gospel will not rank one disciple’s course against another’s at all. We said something adjacent on a feria of Advent four days ago, where the question was whether endurance proves the strength was supplied. Today’s question is a different one: not whether you managed it, but whether anybody may grade you by somebody else’s course. Follow thou me is issued one at a time.

The Tuesday that stayed in the diary

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who did a neighbour’s washing every Tuesday for three years.

The arrangement was unremarkable. Her neighbour could manage neither the walk to the launderette nor the lifting, so she took two bags down on a Tuesday afternoon, fed the machines, sat on the plastic chairs by the window with the paper ticket in her coat pocket, and carried the bags back folded. She picked up a shop on the way. That was the whole of it, and it had been the whole of it since the spring of the first year.

What she found hard was never the Tuesdays. It was a conversation at a parish coffee morning, in which somebody described, admiringly and at length, a woman from the next street who had given up her job to care for her sister full time. Nothing unkind was said. Nothing was said about her at all.

She came away with an arithmetic in her head that she had not asked for and could not put down. Two bags a week, set against a whole working life. She has said since that the arithmetic never resolved.

She did not conclude that the comparison was unfair, and she did not conclude that she was doing enough. Neither of those happened. The sum sat there unfinished, and she went back on the Tuesday, and follow thou me is roughly the size of that.

Here is the part I do not want to overstate, because this is where a story like that usually gets ruined. Keeping the Tuesday did not settle the arithmetic and was not meant to. The washing was clean by four o’clock. Follow thou me does not come with a ratio attached, and it did not supply her with one.

Which is also why Peter’s question never gets answered. Not because it was rude, and not because the answer would have wounded him. It goes unanswered because any answer would have handed him a scale, and a scale is the one thing this Gospel declines to issue. Follow thou me arrives without one.

There is something else in it worth having, which is what the coffee morning could not supply and was never going to. The woman with the sister was not the yardstick. She had her own two bags, whatever they were, and her own Tuesday, and no arithmetic available in that room could convert the one into the other. Follow thou me is issued in units that do not convert.

And if none of the theology here belongs to you, the sentence still works with the God taken out of it. When somebody sets another person’s course beside yours, the useful move is almost never to work out the ratio. It is to keep the next appointment that is actually yours. Follow thou me, with the theology removed, comes to this: your instructions are yours, they are usually small, and they do not grow or shrink according to what the person behind you was told.

↑ The order resumes below.