What does it mean to be a disciple?

This morning, the second of the Catechesis sessions took place in Rio de Janeiro.  One of the sessions was led by His Grace, Mark Coleridge, the Archbishop of Brisbane, Australia.

Catechesis presented by His Excellency, Mark Benedict Coleridge

Archbishop of Brisbane, Australia

On being a disciple

What does it mean to be a disciple?  Unless you are a disciple, there is no way that you will make a disciple of others.  Jesus speaks to us this morning, the same Jesus who spoke to the disciples on the mount.

Disciples – one of the Christian words, but what does it mean to be a disciple?  If we are Christians but not disciples, we end up being baptised pagans.  In Brazil, there is a declining number of Catholics, and an increasing number of adherents of other religious followings.  One of the reasons is that we baptise babies, but don’t provide any other faith formation, so we end up with baptised babies who learn nothing about the faith into which they have been introduced.

What did Jesus mean when he asked the disciples to go, make disciples of all the nations?

Jesus was a Jew.  He wasn’t and Aussie, from the USA or from Canada.  He was a Jew and so were the disciples who were listening to him.  In the Jewish context, you choose your rabbi, your teacher, your master, and ask him to accept you as his disciple.  By doing this, I agree to totally surrender myself to the authority of the rabbi.  It is hard for us to understand this if we come from a culture that says that the only thing that is important is ME.

Jesus was inviting his disciples to go out and call others to surrender their entire lives to the heart of the rabbi, teacher, master that he is.

Another fundamental part of the relationship between the master and the disciple is that the master asks questions of the disciples, and the disciples ask questions of the master.  Both the master and the disciple are teaching each other in this process of questions and answers.

It was also customary that there would be a community of disciples – a yeshiva – and our yeshiva is the Church.  This community of questions, answers, learning which happens in questions and answers, and in the community of the Church is a yeshiva, a school of learning that begins in Baptism and ends only when this lifetime is complete.  The commitment goes beyond spending time with the teacher, learning from him, to being committed to him, like a betrothal.

In the Christian tradition, we do not choose Jesus; he chooses us.  In the Christian setting, we never take leave of Jesus and start making disciples for ourselves!  Never!  What he asks us to do is to draw all people from all walks of life into the relationship of discipleship with Jesus, not disciples of our own.

Who is Jesus?  Who is the Master?  Some say that He is the best of all possible role models, and we should strive the rest of our lives to imitate him, but this is not enough! Don’t reduce discipleship to an imitation of Jesus in a moralizing sense.  At the heart of who Jesus is, crucified and risen, we discover the essence of who he is, of who we must strive to become.  Christianity is not a religion; it is an experience of an encounter with Jesus Christ, crucified and risen (JPII, Redemptor Hominis, March 4, 1979).  This is an experience of amazement which is the heart of Christian discipleship.  All of us are afraid that if we truly entrust our lives to the Master, we will lose too much, but the fact is that if we commit our lives to him, if we say yes to him, we don’t lose anything.  In fact, we gain everything!  Then, once we entrust our lives to the Master, we are able to make disciples of all nations.