Today’s gospel and last Sunday’s gospel are two parts of the one story, a conversation between Jesus and his disciples on the road to Jerusalem.  Last Sunday, Peter recognized that Jesus is the Christ, but in today’s gospel he is going to have to learn what that actually means.  Peter is discovering today that his understanding of the Messiah and Jesus’ understanding of Messiah are completely different.

At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had been waiting for the Messiah to come for thousands of years – they had longed and yearned for his coming.  And it was that expectation of the Messiah’s arrival that gave shape and meaning to their lives.  That was the moment that they hoped for.  But they understood the Messiah in very political terms.  They believed that the Messiah would be a revolutionary who would overthrow the Romans and drive them out, he would expel all of the enemies of the Jewish people and bring liberty and peace to the people.  So, unsurprisingly, Jesus’ disciples also inherited that notion of what the Messiah would be.  They believed that when the time was right, Jesus would rise up, he would be a military superhero who would drive out the Romans, he would overthrow the state and he would establish a new regime, and no doubt they secretly were hoping for the top jobs in the new government.  That was the way that they understood the Messiah.

But Jesus saw things very differently than that and that’s why he talked to them about suffering and rejection and death.  You see, they were already on the way to Jerusalem and Jesus has a strong sense that when they arrive there, things are going to go very badly.  He knows that he is going to face rejection and persecution and that he is going to be killed.  And he is trying to prepare the disciples for all the horrible things that are going to happen to them when they arrive there and that’s why he talks about suffering and rejection and death.  But they can’t cope with this, they don’t want to hear what Jesus is saying because it all seems so absurd.  The idea of a dead Messiah is a contradiction in terms, it’s incomprehensible to them and they don’t want to face it.  That’s why Peter says to Jesus, “Master, stop talking like that.  God forbid that any of that will happen to you.”  But Jesus gets very annoyed and very frustrated because Peter is being an obstacle in his path, Peter is being a stumbling block.  Jesus knows the path that he must follow, he knows what God wants him to do and Peter is trying to deflect him from that and try to get him to follow an easier and more comfortable route but not a route that God has chosen for him.  Jesus is trying to show the disciples that the Messiah is not a conquering king, but rather a suffering servant and in showing them this, Jesus is giving them a very important lesson in what it means to be a disciple.  Jesus is trying to show them that if they choose the path of discipleship - if they want to follow him – they have to go into it with their eyes open.  Jesus doesn’t want them to follow him under false pretenses.  He doesn’t want them to be under any illusions or to think that discipleship is a comfortable or easy option because it’s not.  Jesus is trying to show them that discipleship means service. 

Just As I Have Served You, So You Must Serve One Another is what he says to them.

So the discipleship Jesus is trying to show them, discipleship has nothing to do with glory and power and position.  Discipleship won’t make you rich and it won’t do anything for your popularity.  Rather, discipleship involves sacrifice and putting others first and serving those around you.  The only way that discipleship can be expressed is through concrete acts of service to the people around us.  And that’s what Jesus is trying to get them to see so that they will know what they are committing themselves to if they choose to be disciples.

Being a disciple means getting your hands dirty.  It means becoming involved in the messiness and in the vulnerability of peoples’ lives.  It means finding yourself in situations that you wouldn’t naturally be drawn to and places where you would rather not go, but that you know you must go because you are a disciple and that is where you are called to go.  That’s what discipleship is all about – putting other people first and putting ourselves in second place.  Serving one another.  Jesus is trying to teach them that discipleship has nothing to do with crowns and everything to do with service.

Today’s gospel is a very challenging and very difficult gospel and in my own life I am very well aware of how I fail in that regard, of how I fail in my own call to discipleship.  I am sure that you are no different.  So often I find that I do what I want rather than what God wants, I do my thing rather than God’s thing and therefore I fail in my discipleship and when I try to get myself back on track again, back on the right course, I always find it helpful to look to the example of other people who inspire me and encourage me because of their own efforts at discipleship. 

Just before I came to Christ the King last month I spent a week in Dublin, the capitol of Ireland, giving a retreat to a group of 30 retired nuns.  Now all of these nuns were missionaries and they have retired back to Ireland again.  It was a fascinating experience to get to know them, but it was very hard to know what to say to these women.  How do you speak about Jesus to people who are steeped in Jesus?  How do you speak about discipleship to people who have dedicated their entire lives to discipleship because altogether those 30 nuns have clocked up more than 1,500 years service in Africa.  Some of them spent more than 60 years on the foreign missions.  And as they came to speak to me in the course of the week, I met people who had embarked on a journey of discipleship without knowing where they were going to go and what was going to happen to them.  They found themselves in situations that they never would have imagined in their wildest dreams.  They had been caught up in civil war, in famine and in drought.  One of the sisters described to me the experience she had of hiding in a ditch in Nigeria during the Biafran war when planes were dropping bombs and missiles all around her from overhead.  She thought that she was going to die that day but she said that there was no way she would abandon the people and seek safety elsewhere.  These sisters had worked in schools, clinics, hospitals and operating theaters in practically every country of Africa.  Some had even learned how to fly airplanes so that they could bring sick people to a hospital.  Many of them said that the most difficult moment in their lives was being thousands and thousands of miles away from home when their parents died.  They described how painful that was, how cut off and alone they felt being so far from their family in those moments.  But in spite of their sacrifices, in spite of the hard work that they have done in so many countries and in spite of their old age and infirmity at the moment, every single one of those sisters said to me, “God has been very good to me.  I have no regrets.  I would do it all again.”  These sisters would understand the meaning, the positive meaning, in today’s gospel because they have lived it.  It has become part of their lives.  They know what discipleship is all about.

Now, God doesn’t call all of us to do what they have done but God has a call for each and every one of us in our own unique way.  Most people here are called to the vocation of marriage.  For some that vocation has changed into the vocation of widowhood.  Some are called to the single life, some are called to the priesthood and religious life.  There are all kinds of ways and directions in which God’s call may take us.  God addresses that call individually and uniquely to each one of us so the forms of the call are different, but the level of commitment required of each and every one of us is exactly the same.  God calls us to follow him completely – heart and soul and body – to follow him completely.  So, in our mass today as we reflect on this gospel, let’s use this opportunity to pray for the courage to follow the Lord completely in whatever way that he has called us to do so.

Amen.

Congregation:  Amen.