WE are celebrating the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time this week. Our Gospel for this Sunday talks about excuses. We all have our own excuses. We have excuses for not following through on our good intentions, not living up to the challenge of discipleship. Jesus encounters in this week's Gospel text three would-be followers. These three would-be disciples were great at manufacturing excuses that would allow them to gracefully bow out of discipleship when it got too demanding or uncomfortable. Jesus responds with a no-nonsense, no-excuses mandate, separating those who would follow from those who could only hesitate and calculate the cost of their commitment.
The naive, thoughtless pledge of the first of these three potential disciples sounds as though he were actually committed to joining Jesus. But Jesus' response lays out the truth about his identity and mission, and makes it clear how demanding a personal commitment to this path would be.
