What do you want to do with the messages? Just display them to humans? Make decisions?
Either way, you probably want to use an API field, such as status.message or status.phase, rather than the get summary.
Get the full API object for a pod to see an example of what the fields contain: kubectl get pod mypod-wzyx3 -o yaml
Phase documentation is here:
Full API documentation is here:
Once you choose a field, you can use jsonpath or go templates to print just that field, if you plan to use kubectl to get the data from apiserver. Some examples can be found here: