The Curious Case of idou: Discipleship as Justice-seeking Beholding
“Seek into the beholding…”—Julian of Norwich “Don’t think, but look!” —Ludwig Wittgenstein In his classic The Cost of Discipleship , Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that, “When Christ calls a man [sic], he bids him come and die” (87). As Christians, we are called to a life of discipleship, of dying to self and learning to follow Jesus as Lord. Each of the Gospels offers us a distinct, and integral, picture of what form that discipleship might take. Markan disciples, for example, are easily recognizable as the ones who consistently do not recognize Jesus. They are, in the language of the day, a little slow on the uptake, always a day late and a dollar short. Matthean disciples, by contrast, appear more sure-footed, confident, upbeat, and seemingly free of the chronic, benighted confusion that plagues the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. But what of discipleship in Luke? How does Jesus’ call to “follow me” manifest itself in this most literary of the synoptics? As the “gospe...