“What is it you wish me to do for you?” Jesus asks each of us in today’s Gospel.  What would we ask for? The culture we live in influences us as it did Jesus’ disciples.  Would we ask for celebrity? More ‘likes’ on Facebook? More friends on social media? Would we ask to win the loto? “What is it you want me to do for you? “ It goes against the grain to ask Jesus for pain and suffering.  “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”  Jesus offers us the grace of transformation from self-centeredness to awareness of my sister and brother. “..whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.”  The path to that transformation is through suffering.  Why we might ask.  Why is the path through suffering?  It is because God is a community of lovers and not a community of isolated egos.

There is a 2008 movie, entitled The Trial which you can still watch on YouTube, which asks this question:  if God is good and all-powerful, why is the world full of suffering..  In the movie, a group of men in Auschwitz, awaiting their fate in the gas chambers, begin to rail against God.  They decide to hold a trial with God as the accused. The charges against God are that he is calloused and indifferent to their suffering and in the end God is convicted on all counts. However, in the final scene, the movie ends with these same prisoners praying to this God whom they cannot comprehend. [1]

We are born into this world with very large egos.  In fact, for a young baby, mother is not a separate person but is something that is a part of me. ‘Mother’ is something that happens to me; when I’m hungry, something warm and sweet is put in my mouth; when I’m cold and wet, something takes the discomfort away. Mommy exists to serve me. Gradually as we grow and develop, we begin to understand that there are other persons in this world beside myself.  Our journey then is to move beyond our own egos and recognize the other as a person  independent of my needs and desires. But then what happens is that we want to dominate the other, to become the boss.  “You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” As children we used to play a very old game called, the King of the castle. You would stand on a little hill and challenge others to knock you off the hill. If they succeeded, they became the ‘king of the castle’.  If you prevailed, you remained the king! Something like our election campaigns! Don’t we often at times continue playing adult versions of the King of the Castle.  That’s what happened in today’s Gospel where Mark shows us how those men and women following Jesus, didn’t really have a clue as to who He was and what his mission was about. “Grants us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” We want to be the kings of the castle!! Unfortunately, as the saying goes, ‘we grow too soon oldt, and too late schmart!” 

Breaking down our own egoistic demands is painful but necessary if we are to be followers of Jesus who was the suffering servant described in our First Reading from Isaiah.  Jesus himself gave us the best example of what this means when at the Last Supper he washed the feet of his disciples. There are many ways in which we cannot give in to the little emperor our egos can be.  This becomes a reality each time we live and act with the kind of love Paul describes in the famous passage from Corinthians: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; It is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.”

An inspirational speaker, Stephen R. Covey, wrote a well-known book called, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People published in 1989.  It sold more than 25M copies worldwide and was translated into 40 languages. Time magazine recognized him as one of the 25 most influential Americans.  He begins by asking us to quietly imagine the following: “In your mind’s eye, see yourself going to the funeral parlour or chapel…As you walk inside the building you notice the flowers.. you see the faces of friends and family. You feel the shared sorrow of losing, the joy of having known that radiates from the hearts of the people there. As you look inside the casket, you suddenly come face to face with yourself.  ..there are four speakers scheduled to say something-a family member, a friend, a colleague and someone from the larger community.  What would you like each of these speakers to say about you?”   This is a good mental exercise to do occasionally because it forces us to put our lives in perspective.  What is important, is not what we achieved or did, which will be quickly forgotten, but how we treated others-our family members, our friends, our neighbours, the strangers we met.  As Pope Francis said in his homily on the Feast of St. Augustine, “But in his heart, there remained the restlessness of the search for the profound meaning of life. His heart was not anesthetized by success, by things, by power….We must look into our hearts and ask if we have a heart that wants great things or a heart that is asleep. Has our heart maintained that restlessness or has it been suffocated by things? The restlessness of love always pushes us forward to go out and encounter the other without waiting for the other to tell us what he needs.” Jesus, through his life and his words, and especially through his suffering and death, taught us how we should treat others: “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

To die to ourselves, to break down the walls our egos construct which prevent us from opening up to others, is not easy.  It is only possible because Jesus gives us the grace to transform ourselves.  “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are yet without sin.” Jesus of Nazareth was transformed through his suffering into the Christ “who is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.” This image of a man, Jesus, sitting with God in his heavenly kingdom gives hope to all of us because we too have been transformed through his grace and one day we too will sit as humans before God’s throne. By baptism we are forever united with this God-man.  “Let your love be upon us, Lord, even as we hope in you.”