This morning’s readings suggest at least three models of discipleship.
The most daunting of the three is perhaps that sketched by St Paul. The model he holds out to us is that of the dedicated athlete, whose disciplined training regime punishes and enslaves the body to bring it into that condition of steely readiness that wins the race and takes home the gold medal. We shall be continually reminded of that model over the coming days as we watch the Winter Olympics, even if we shan’t see the long years of dedicated training that lie behind the performance of every athlete out there, even the ones with no chance of a medal. It’s a tradition that has had many distinguished and saintly adherents. Here is just one example from Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. In his essay on the Zealous Amendment of our whole Life, he writes:
Remember always thy end, and how that time lost never returns thou wilt always rejoice in the evening, if thou spend the day profitably. Be watchful over thyself, stir up thyself, warn thyself, and whatsoever becomes of others, neglect not thyself. The more holy violence thou usest against thyself, the more shall be thy spiritual profiting.
Sober stuff, an early ancestor of the Protestant work ethic which has influenced, perhaps indeed afflicted, so many of us. Reminiscent too of John Wesley, never at rest, never wasting a moment of time or a penny of resource, perpetually busy in the Lord’s work, from early morning until late at night, until his ageing body would carry him no further.
As Paul acknowledges from his own place high on the podium of early Christian evangelism – only one receives the prize. To be fair to the metaphor, there will be plenty of others at the winter Olympics who will be quite rightly satisfied if they can perform to the very best of their ability, even if that’s not enough to win a medal. But even if we admit that modification, the Pauline or Olympic model, is one that produces lots of discouraged, even guilty losers, ordinary folk like me and perhaps a fair few of you too, who are not quite that driven, but worry that we ought to be. I admire those immensely strong men and women who can cope with it. They achieve so much for which the rest of us should be profoundly grateful. But not all of us are blessed with the energy and stamina required, and those that are may not always be the easiest people to live with. If it’s a model that works for you, that gets you going in the morning and enables you to look back on the day with some satisfaction in the evening, then fine, go with it; but if it just makes you feel tired, guilty and a failure, then probably you should look for a different model.
The little girl in our Old Testament reading offers perhaps the most attractive of our three models. Snatched from her family and carried away into slavery, she would have had every reason to be withdrawn and resentful, and indeed to abandon her faith in a god who had so spectacularly failed her, her family and her nation. But not a bit of it. We don’t know how she was treated in the household of Naaman the Syrian, though we may infer that she had encountered at least some kindness among her captors. Even so, the love for her master, as well as the faith in her god and in Elisha, which prompts her to step forward and suggest how Naaman might be cured of his leprosy, is an example of that simple child-like trust in the love of God that Jesus himself commended. It did not occur to her to think in terms of tribal antagonism. Her master was a good man who had suffered a terrible misfortune; she loved him as her master and wanted to help; and she knew in her heart that the god who loved her and had taken care of her despite the vicissitudes of war would share her loving concern and heal her master. Of course he would. And he did. Her simple faith led to a wonderful miracle of healing, which must surely have had wider repercussions on relations between the Israelites and the Aramaeans, at least for a while.
The simple, direct faith of that little girl holds the key to an alternative model of discipleship, and you don’t have to be a child to adopt it. I have recently been reading my aunt’s account of how she and my uncle, who had been working in Bucharest with the Church Mission to the Jews, made their way home from there to London in June 1940, with no more than ten pounds between them. In Milan when all international trains had been stopped, and again in Paris as the German army approached, they stopped to pray, there being nothing else they could do, and somehow in their innocence they were carried unharmed through the most terrible dangers. Luck or providence, who can say? Such child-like trustfulness in grown-up people is a gift of grace which few of us have and I am deeply suspicious of those who use a hot line to the Almighty to manipulate others but at their humble unassuming best, such people show us a wonderfully attractive model of discipleship.
And then there is the leper in our gospel story. “If you choose, you can make me clean”. Naaman, you remember, had to be rebuked because he thought he knew how Elisha should heal him. The leper in Mark’s story does not even insist that Jesus must heal him, still less does he attempt to dictate how he should set about it. He merely asserts his faith that Jesus is able to heal him, and leaves the rest in his hands. There is much discussion about whether God has limited his power to intervene. The gift of freedom must include the freedom to hate rather than to love, the freedom to do evil rather than to do good. God cannot be perpetually intervening some would say that he cannot intervene at all without compromising that freedom, and hatred and evil have consequences which have to be worked out. Yet I cannot persuade myself that He does not have the power to intervene. “Lord, if you choose, you can.”
The other thing we know about God is that He loves us. He does, He loves us into life, and He wants us to enjoy life to the full. But you and I cannot see the whole picture as He can. Like Naaman we think we know when and even how He should intervene to turn us or someone else away from their folly, or to stop the progress of some terrible disease. And we are upset when He won’t dance to our tune. But we have to allow Him to know what is best. I do not doubt that he would prefer to laugh and sing and dance with us on the sunny uplands of life, and for the most part that has been my experience, but there will be other times when He has to go with us through pain and misery and loss. It is then that we have to trust Him in His love to comfort and strengthen us, and in His good time to show us what even better things He has in store. For a while we may even lose sight of Him in the darkness, though I am persuaded that He will never lose sight of us. And one day, when we can see as He sees, we shall understand as He understands. Meanwhile we can offer to him our sorrows as well as our joys, and trust Him to give them back to us transformed by His love.
There are probably as many different models of discipleship as there are Christians, and each of us must find the model which suits us best, and then cultivate it. If you have the grace of a childlike faith, listen carefully, test what your faith seems to tell you against what we know of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, and have the courage to say and do what you know to be right. If you are called to follow a more Pauline model of rigorously disciplined discipleship, then you should do that, but please remember that we are not all called to do the same. And if neither of those models suits you, remember the leper who did not know all the answers, but had just enough faith and vision for the next small step. “Lord, if you choose, you can”.
Handley Stevens