Imaging walking with Jesus, listening to His teachings, observing (perhaps even experiencing) His miracles-- for something like three years. That's what Jesus' disciples did. You'd think in that amount of time and with that daily exposure, they would have come to understand jesus pretty-well. But that isn't the case, and today's Gospel reading (Lk 9: 43B-45) is just one of the times when Jesus says something and the disciples just don't get it. Today Jesus tells them that He must be "handed over to men," predicting His crucifixion. The disciples hear whant He says, but, Luke tells us, "its meaning was hidden from them so that they should not understand it, and they were afraid to ask Him about this saying." The phrase "its meaning was hidden from them" almost suggests that some external force is preventing them from understanding whas Jesus is saying, and in a sense that may be the case. Perhaps Jesus is telling the disciples things that He does not really want them to understand in real time. Perhaps here, and elsewhere, Jesus is saying things that will make sense to them only when the full scope of His mission is understood, after His death and resurrection. Why would Jesus do that? Why not make everything abundantly clear at the time? Why didn't Jesus just reveal all of His glory (the transfiguration on steroids, so to speak) to everyone and save people the trouble of figuring out later what was going on? I think what we're seeing here, and so many other places in the Gospels, is part of the dance God (through jesus) does with us to preserve our free will. God above all wants us to love Him, as God loves us, and to be united with us incompletely here on earth and completely in heaven. But that can only happen if we choose it. That choice can't be a snap decision, or a knee-jerk reaction, or some other superficial reaction or expression. None of that is real. We wouldn't take seriously a potential spouse whose profession of love was nothing more than an off-hand expression. We'd want more, more thought, more reflection, more seriousness. God is that way too. God wants us to consider what we're saying when we say we choose to follow Jesus. That means thinking every day about what jesus has told us-- understanding now what His disciples could not understand at the time, but still having an understanding that is so very limited-- and trying to know what God is saying to us. That choice-- that choice of trying to understand and trying to follow-- is what we are given. We are called to exercise our free will and choose correctly. We ask God to give us the grace to do so.