29th Sunday 2021
Isaiah 53:10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45
Those of you who attended Sr. Reina’s Final Profession last Sunday will recall the challenging readings which Sister chose, beginning “My child, if you aspire to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal,” from the book of Ecclesiasticus. Fr. Peter, in his homily, picked up on this theme, and warned that, along with the joys and successes, there will be difficulties and even disasters.
A year or two or three before Sister Reina’s Profession, I recall that, at my diaconate ordination, I received a card which quoted Our Lord’s closing words from today’s Gospel: “The Son of Man Himself came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many”.
The two messages, from occasions in fact forty six years apart, are essentially the same. We are called—and that means not just sisters or priests but all the baptised—to be the Body of the Son of Man, who came to serve and to suffer. A religious sister assumes that role in a very public way, as a sign to the rest of the Church and to the world, but it is a role to which every Christian is committed.
We hear it expressed today, firstly by Deutero-Isaiah (Second Isaiah) in one of his Songs of the Suffering Servant. These songs are, for us, associated particularly with Holy Week, when we hear how Jesus, Son and Servant, fitted perfectly the description of the Servant crushed with suffering, offering His life in atonement, taking the faults of many on Himself. Can you see how you, to a lesser degree, fit within that context, uniting your own sufferings and difficulties with those of Jesus, offering them to the Father for the salvation of the world, making up by them, as St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, all that has still to be undergone in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of His Body, the Church?
In the Second Reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, we hear Jesus described as the Supreme High Priest. Why? Because He has suffered and died, taking His own blood into the true Holy of Holies, the presence of God, as the priests took the blood of sacrificed animals into the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. This true priest is one of us, “feeling our weaknesses with us”, being tempted as we are; and we, by our baptism and confirmation are anointed by the Holy Spirit as priests with and in Him.
Finally, in the Gospel, Our Lord points out to James and John and, by extension, to the rest of us, that we are called to receive His baptism and to drink His cup. “That’s fine,” you may say: “I have been baptised, and I drink the cup of His Blood.” True, but the baptism and the cup here have a fuller and a deeper meaning. Jesus, already baptised by John, still has another baptism to endure, a baptism of blood; still has another cup to drink, that cup of suffering which He prayed, in the Garden of the Agony, might pass Him by. He now asks us, as He asked the two brothers, whether we can share His baptism and His cup. How do you answer that question?
All of this we must do without pretensions, without swank, without seeking earthly power. In line with these words of Our Lord, Pope Francis has stated that anyone who wishes to be a bishop is the last person who should become one. That may seem obvious to you and me, but there are people who actually long to be bishops. Indeed, there was a cardinal at the last conclave who allegedly lost favour because he was said to be actively canvassing for votes to become pope. Similarly, the American cardinal who is most prominent in his criticism of the Holy Father is notorious for swanning around in a cappa magna, the huge flowing train beloved of the prince bishops of old, behaviour which surely runs contrary to Our Lord’s strictures on broader phylacteries and longer tassels.
Does all this sound a little gloomy, as if following Christ, being part of the Body of Christ, is all self-denial and suffering? It isn’t. The joy and fulfilment in Our Lord’s life are very evident in the Gospels. I suspect that the true message is that, only by seeking to live in Christ and to imitate His life of service, will we find that joy and fulfilment. There is no room for that superficial, spurious joy of the “Smile, Jesus loves you” variety. Only my awareness that it would not be very Christlike keeps me from wanting to bop the “Smile...” brigade on the nose and to say “Try smiling now, sunshine.” Joy there is, but only in the context of service.
