Are there any Scripture passages that haunt you?
There are a few sentences in the New Testament that simply haunt me as a disciple of Jesus. They work their way into my brain and lay there and I go round and round with them like a rotisserie. Today’s gospel contains two of them. The first one reads like a one sentence examination of conscience. “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” The second one follows a few lines down. “Where I am, there also my servant will be.” I don’t know about you, but both of those hit me square between the eyes each time I hear them.
In my former parish, I had my share of visitors who would come to the door asking for help. I was enjoying the every other week Saturday morning when my associate had the morning mass and I could sleep in. At 7:58 the doorbell rang. I ignored it. It rang again, a bit more urgently, it seemed. I thought about ignoring it, then decided it might really be an emergency, so I reluctantly got out of bed. Now, it takes a while to get from my bedroom to the front door. In that interim, the door bell rang again in a pattern that I had heard before. I peeked out the window, and saw one of the people whom I help on a regular basis. Oh… I just wanted to sleep a bit more. He wanted to see Jesus.
I confess, I did not open the door. Though I knew he would be back, (and knew he had a place to stay and three meals a day) I just wasn’t ready to face him first thing in the morning. And when he did come back, I am pretty sure what he experienced was a slightly put out Fr. Bill Kempf and not Jesus. “Sir, I want to see Jesus.” I’m not sure if he did…
And I know that because of the second phrase that haunts me. “Where I am, there also my servant will be.” Dang! Because I know where that is! It is what Jesus spells out in the rest of today’s passage and in the rest of his life. It is the one message that keeps coming back to me as I try to understand the life of Jesus. And it is why he said it so often, in so many ways, because I resist it time and time again. “Those who love their lives lose them. The first shall be last. The greatest must be the servant. Unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies…” All those metaphors point to the same truth. The pattern of our living, if we are to be true disciples of Jesus, somehow has to get caught up in sacrificial, self giving love. Where Jesus is – where He lives – is where I have to be, where I have to get myself. If I want to save my life, then I have to lose it in love for others. And lose it willingly, not begrudgingly, like that morning at 7:58 am…
Isn’t that the biggest challenge in our lives as priests, as married couples, as professed religious, as widowers and widows, as faith filled single people? – To find a way to let our YES stay willing? Not grudgingly serving when I am in the mood or when it is a convenient time, but to be ready to let people see Christ in me in every moment, because I choose to let his love empower me, let his love flow through and in me?
Perhaps another way to hear this same message comes from my days in the seminary. One of the classes we took was “Oral Interpretation of the Scriptures.” The class was designed to help us proclaim the readings and the gospels in ways that people would hear the good news. So you got to stand in front of your classmates and a video camera and proclaim a reading, while your classmates took notes and then gave you ‘feedback.” And the one sentence question that was the ultimate evaluation of whether a student had done a good job was this: “Did I experience the reader, or the reading? Perhaps that is why these two sentences haunt me so – because they are echoes of that sentence – Do people experience in my love the love of Jesus for them? Do they see a love that is willing to sacrifice again and again? Or do they see something else. ‘Sir, we want to see Jesus.” Not you. Not me. Jesus.
As we continue our journey toward Easter, pick one or both of those sentences. Let them be the first thing you say in the morning and the last thing you say in the evening. Like bookends, may they give you the pattern and the incentive to live all moments of the day in between by making them a reality in your world.