DISCIPLESHIP
St Stephen/year B/29th Sunday/October 20th 1991
Do you remember the old saying "God is easy to please but hard to
satisfy"?
Because that truth is so important, yet so little understood by
those who seldom or never set foot inside a church; and because even
some of those who do come to church often have failed to
grasp the truth for themselves or understand what it
means in practical terms, I thought it would be an idea to look at it
more closely today
"God is easy to please but hard to satisfy"
Jesus' apostles, the brothers James and John were what you might call
"ambitious young men". In the gospel according to St Mark we
hear of them going to Jesus and brazenly asking him to give them the Top
Places in his Kingdom. And if that isn't being ambitious, I don't know
what is. "Please God, I want to be top dog" But Jesus reply to these
two enterprising young men was neither a flat refusal (he didn't just say
NO!) nor yet a telling-off for being ambitious; it was the other
disciples you may remember who were indignant about the whole thing.
Jesus' reply was in two parts. "I don't think you understand what
you're asking for", he said; and then he added "are
you really prepared to go through with the sort of suffering which
being my disciples may entail? And even if you are
prepared to suffer alongside me, you can't expect my heavenly Father
to make all his ideas turn around your own personal ambitions.
The Kingdom of Heaven just doesn't work like that. There's a good
many surprises in store for you about who will really be at the top."
Jesus, I think, was really rather pleased with the ambitiousness of James
and John. For ambition is no more to be regretted in a young person
than the fact that they have grown up. As those of you who are parents
will know, to have a child who seems to have no ambitions, no
will to achieve anything in life can be a great distress; and by
the same token a child whose parents have no
ambitious or hopes or expectation for him is for that child to get off to
a very bad start in life, so bad indeed that some people never recover
from it. They remain what psychologists call "habitual
under-achievers" and are, in fact, quite seriously
damaged people emotionally.
So ambition in itself is a good thing, and to be a child of God and
have ambitions is, in the eyes of our heavenly Father, some thing
with which he is "well pleased"
But ambition on its own is not enough. No father,
earthly or heavenly is going to be satisfied with the
fact that his son merely "has ambitions". He needs
to know that these ambitions are both worthwhile and achievable
If his child sets their sights too low then any satisfaction the
achievement of them may give will be pretty short-lived
if they set their sight too unrealistically high, then they may give
up trying when they find it's beyond them
A wise parent will seek to guide their child between the levels of
the unworthy and the unattainable ambitions: between what is
altogether too easy and altogether too difficult, bearing in mind of
course that the occasional setback or disappointment over the failure to
achieve a goal which was slightly unrealistically high never did anyone
permanent harm. Indeed such an experience can act as a spur to
"having another go" and getting it right next time.
Always to be successful first time in life is to miss out on one of
its most important lessons, namely "If at first you
don't succeed, try, try again"
Being a disciple means, literally, being a "learner". In
other words, as disciples of Jesus we never quite get rid
of our L plates. The Christian who thinks he's got nothing left
to learn is sooner or later going to be in for a rude shock. The
disciples were always at first forgetting what Jesus had taught them
For the path which god the Father had mapped out for God the Son, Jesus
Christ, was the road of the Suffering Servant, foreseen
many years before the Incarnation by the prophet Isaiah. "By his
sufferings shall my righteous servant put many people
on the right road to salvation, taking their faults on himself"
The whole scheme of God's redemptive purpose takes in the process of
suffering: suffering himself in Jesus Christ, and inviting his disciples
to share his cup of suffering themselves
That, if you like, is the nearest we ever get to an answer to the question
so many people ask "Why does God allow suffering?" The answer of
course is that we don't know; but we do know that he willingly took
it upon himself, because it was both his and his Father's
ambition for him that he should do so. All suffering accepted in the
course of serving the Living God is a sacrifice acceptable to him
And in Jesus, as the writer to the Hebrews said, we have a high
priest who is capable of feeling our weaknesses with us, tempted at all
points like us though without sin; someone who
learnt obedience through what he had to suffer
Our ambition as the adopted sons and daughter of the
heavenly Father must be, in the end, to fulfil his will for us in the way
in which Jesus Christ does and did. That process is almost bound to
involve hardship and suffering somewhere down the line
The particular form that sonship or discipleship will take will be
different for each one of us, and the suffering which we are asked
to bear will be different, too. But then we are all different, and it is
only to be expected that an all-wise, all loving Father will have
different ambitions for each one of his children
As those who have, like Jesus, James, and John did, embraced the Father's
ambitions for us we shall be able, as the writer to the Hebrews says, to
be "confident in approaching the throne of grace that we shall have mercy
from him and find grace when we are in need of help