As I have tried to suggest, the call to holiness is a call to make every effort to become more like Jesus – to embrace His ways of thinking and acting. This takes faith. This takes a true belief that God created us in His image and the purpose of earthly life is to cooperate with Him in growing in His incarnated likeness, Jesus. Most often this means not acting in accord with our human impulses but asking ourselves What Would Jesus Do?

I realize that this would be simpler if we could actually see and talk with Jesus like His disciples did. The interesting thing is that from the accounts we have, although Jesus was an extremely charismatic man, only a few really chose to follow Him. The Gospels tell us that many more turned away from Him than followed Him. It seems that after His resurrection, many followed His disciples because they shared that He rose from the dead.

So what do we make of this. We know that at least 72 initially followed Him and that He picked 12 out of that number to be His Apostles, those empowered to preach as He did and to cure others. The others became their support group. This means, however, that the actual number that first responded to His message was relatively few and yet, His Apostles managed to attract great numbers to THE WAY – that is the Jesus way of living. So we are in the same situation as those who decided to follow the JESUS WAY because of the preaching of His Apostles. We know from history that those who joined the Christian movement, after Jesus ascended into heaven, became so convinced of the message that they were willing to die rather than deny the truth of the Jesus message. They became convinced of the truth of His message because they saw others truly embracing the message.

So the call to holiness is a call to truly believe that the message of Jesus about how to live this earthly life is true and that living as He lived can bring true meaning and purpose to our lives.