Tuesdays with Jesus

Seeing how death teaches us about life

03/16/2022

Mt 20:17-28 As Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the Twelve disciples aside by themselves, and said to them on the way, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.” Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee approached Jesus with her sons and did him homage, wishing to ask him for something. He said to her, “What do you wish?” She answered him, “Command that these two sons of mine sit, one at your right and the other at your left, in your kingdom.”

Many years ago I read a very moving book called “Tuesdays with Morrie.” Have you heard of it or read it? It was about the author, Mitch Albom, who returns to visit his college sociology professor after he learns that he is dying from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. His professor’s name is Morrie Schwartz, and Mitch spends fourteen consecutive Tuesdays walking with him and watching him die. The book chronicles the last lessons that Morrie taught Mitch as his professor, not only about sociology but also about spirituality, about what ultimately matters most.

Here are two memorable quotations that jumped out at me. On one Tuesday, Morrie said: “Everyone knows they are going to die, but no one believes it.” In other words, we all seem to waltz through most of life under the illusion of immortality. That is why a sudden terminal illness or even the deaths of civilians in Ukraine surprise and shock us. We all know we are going to die, but it feels really hard to believe it will happen to me, until death is suddenly thrust upon us by cancer or combat.

The second quotation was from the same Tuesday. Morrie taught: “Most of us walk around as if we’re sleep walking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half asleep, doing the things we automatically think we have to do.” Mitch asked: “And facing death changes that?” Morrie answered wisely: “Oh, yes. When you realize you’re going to die, you see everything much differently.” He concluded: “Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.” By the way, that is why the best contributors to the church are always the elderly. They are facing death, so they know what really matters: give to the church!

In the gospel today, Jesus teaches his own “Tuesdays with Morrie” lessons. How so? Well, he wants to emphasize how he will face his own death on the Cross in Jerusalem, like how Morrie faced ALS. But Jesus also hopes that will help the apostles learn how to live better too, that is, in sharing the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection, like Mitch shared the good news of all the lessons he learned from Morrie through his best-selling book. The apostles wrote a best-selling book, too, called The Bible!

Sadly, though, we see the apostles are walking around half-sleeping. They are worried about who will sit in places of honor in the kingdom. Jesus’ point in the gospel today was essentially the same as Morrie’s, namely, “learn how to die…and you will learn how to live.” It was Jesus own suffering and death that gave meaning to his whole life. And that would be the same for the apostles: death would teach them the meaning of life.

Folks, we are only two weeks into Lent. If you are still looking for something spiritual to do, may I suggest some reading material? If you have not read "Tuesdays with Morrie", I highly recommend that book. Here are two other books you could read for the rest of Lent. I have just started reading a novel called “Jayber Crow” by Wendell Berry.

It’s about the life of a barber in a small town next to a river, so it has some similarities to Fort Smith, winding next to the Arkansas River. The protagonist, Jayber, recalls: “Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Through I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened to other people.” Then he adds: “And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing, I began to understand that whenever death happened it happened to me.” In other words, it was when Jayber Crow, the barber, learned about death that he began to learn about life.

The second book for spiritual reading this Lent is one we’re all familiar with, namely, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. We have had so much snow lately, it still feels like Christmas in March, so this book seems apropos. You remember old Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. But which ghost literally scares the hell out of Scrooge? The future ghost. How did he do it? He transports Ebenezer to his lonely grave, where no one comes to mourn his loss. Staring at his own grave, Scrooge suddenly learns the meaning of life.

And that is the final lesson of Lent: “learning how to die…we learn how to live.”

Praised be Jesus Christ!