Saturday of the Third Week of Easter
Four weeks ago, my best friend Ryan Mahle covered my Saturday reflection for me because my wife and I were at the hospital having our son, Ignatius. Now, I get to cover for Ryan as he and his wife come home from the hospital with their second son, Isaac. So now is a fitting time to reflect on today’s gospel and an important lesson that Ryan has taught me. He reached out to me with a view of Christian brotherhood that I had never encountered. His attitude conveyed to me the challenge of the Christian life, and that is what I want to spend time on today. That challenge is captured in today’s gospel and I want to examine it from three questions that appear in John.
The first question is, “Does this shock you?” I feel like this should be a clear and resounding “Yes!” But for the first 25 years of my life, I’m not sure it was. The claims, works, and teachings of Christ that got him killed, were simply answers to memorize for my next religion test. The shock value of the gospel was lost on me. The call to love my enemies, the proposition that God drew so close to us that we could kill Him, the Resurrection, my responsibility to care for the poor; none of these things shocked me. They should shock us though. They demand a response from us. When we see the way that the gospel begs us to respond we should be shocked, we should be challenged.
Further in the gospel we encounter the next question, “Do you also want to leave?” To hear Christ asking us this question brings His call clearly into the light. To explain the way this question challenges us, I’d like to bring in my sister. She is a Dominican sister who took final vows about four years ago. The time period spent preparing to take vows was an intense period of discernment called the Novitiate. When I was talking to her about that experience, she said that, “You really don’t start discerning until the first person leaves.” When we hear Christ ask us if we want to say no to Him, we really begin to face what it means to say yes to Him.
Finally, “Master, to whom shall we go?” This last question really presents the surrender of the disciple. Not a surrender like one would find between two warring nations. No, this surrender is the surrender of the mind to a truth that is far beyond its comprehension; the surrender of the heart to a love that infinitely surpasses our finite expectations. This is the surrender that we are called to make through our encounter with Christ. The encounter that breaks down our illusions of the Christian life being easy as we realize that we can’t do this on our own.
Accepting that I can’t do this on my own is the challenge that I see in today’s gospel and the challenge that Ryan introduced me to two years ago. Father Satish also introduced me to this challenge through the words of a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who once said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and to die.” Does this shock you? Maybe. But above all else it should present the challenge of the disciple’s response to Christ’s “Do you also want to leave?” To answer that I need to die to my selfishness, pride, and sense of self-sufficiency. He has the words of Eternal life, to whom else would I go?
-Spencer Hargadon