Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent -The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve

True friends love us enough to tell us when we are wrong. When our lives go off the rails they do not stand by and simply allow us to slide into moral, physical, or spiritual decline. They do not embrace a policy of lazy neglect that ignores problems and pretends that everything is fine. They are not afraid to tell us what we do not want to hear because they care about us and want what is best for us. This is what makes it so difficult to be God’s prophet. God loves us with a perfect love: in Him there is no self-preserving fear of confrontation, in Him there is no selfish need to be liked and praised. He commissions his prophets to confront His people with their sin, because by this sin we wound ourselves; yet we, the people of God, do not respond well to such criticism.

In our first reading from Jeremiah and also our psalm we hear the prayers of frightened prophets who have been faithful mouthpieces of God and are consequently in danger of being put to death. Jermiah pleads: ‘Must good be repaid with evil, that they should dig a pit to take my life?’ (Jeremiah 18: 20). The Psalmist prays: ‘I hear the whispers of the crowd, that frighten me from every side, as they consult together against me, plotting to take my life’ (Psalm 31(30): 13). When confronted with the love of God, we tend to respond fearfully by attacking the messenger. The perfect revelation of God’s love is of course the Incarnate Word Himself, Jesus Christ. In today’s gospel he warns his disciples that he too will be rejected and killed.

James and John fail to grasp the significance of Jesus’ warning. Christ’s passion, His death, and His resurrection: all these have consequences for us. We are to be conformed to Christ, we must share his death to share his life. Greatness in the Kingdom of heaven, then, is measured by our likeness to Christ, it is measured by love. In today’s gospel, Jesus spells out the implications: ‘whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave’ (Matthew 20: 26-27).

From this we can draw two related conclusions: First, the one who loves like Christ will put the needs of others before their own. They will be like the Christ who came ‘not to be served but to serve’ (Matthew 20: 28). Second, the one who loves like Christ will be marginalised by friend and foe alike, rejected as the prophets were rejected and as Christ himself was rejected. Jesus warns us in Luke’s gospel that his disciples will be given up even by ‘parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends’ (Luke 21: 16), and that ‘the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is doing service to God’ (John 16:2). The gospel is not always politically correct and it is not always popular; yet if we stay silent in the face of evil and injustice we betray our society. We fail in charity if we do not speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15) . ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4; Deuteronomy 8:3) . Our job as Christians is to proclaim that Word (Matthew 28:19; Mark 16:15; John 20:21). We do not love our neighbour if we remain silent.