John Webster on discipleship

The command is to follow at a distance: 'Follow after me', Jesus commands Simon and Andrew.

In the movement required of the disciples that is there can be no question of them being companions of Jesus in the way in the sense of fellow travellers of equal ability and dignity. No, between the one who follows and the one who follows there is always an unbridgeable distance.

Like the cloud and pillar of fire in the wilderness, Jesus goes ahead of his followers. He is present with them, yes, but he is present always as the transcendent Lord.

Nor can there be any hope for the eventual closing of the gap between Jesus and those who follow. The distance between him and them is not such that we can expect that it will gradually narrow and finally close entirely as the disciples grow in knowledge or skill or virtue. No, they are permanently, by nature and not merely temporarily, those who come after him.

The summons to follow doesn't look ahead to growing proximity but to a condition in which the disciples walk in the wake of Jesus, in which they pulled along by his movement. Set in motion by him, but always unlike him and so behind him.

In this connection, of course, much might be made of the distinctiveness of following Jesus, over and against the relations between Rabbi and pupil or between moral model and the one who imitates such an example.

The pupil eventually becomes a Rabbi, the imitator grows like the model. But the disciple never moves beyond the condition of following. There is no assimilation to be awaited. Even at the end of the disciples' journey with Jesus in Mark, after the resurrection, Jesus continues to go before his disciples, anticipating them as they hasten in his direction.

[...]

The substance of Jesus' call is, further: 'follow me'. It is irreducibly personal, notice: a call to enter into a movement which is a relation to Jesus himself.

Everything hangs on this. Jesus speaks in his own name, with his own authority. He doesn't refer the one called to some other, not even to God himself. Discipleship is a matter of of following Jesus as personal absolute, that is as the absolute in person. Following Jesus isn't a command to take upon oneself a commitment to some cause or principle or truth beyond or behind Jesus - as if Jesus were the symbol or highest instance of something other than himself.

The name of Jesus cannot be eliminated without losing everything.

As Bonhoeffer puts it: in the matter of discipleship Jesus is the only content.

(about the 40min mark, MP3 lecture, John Webster, Discipleship and calling, Scottish Evangelical Theology Conference 2005)