Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: suffering

  • The Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    What feels like a hundred years ago, now, when I was a young adult, I had a membership to a boxing gym that I would go to after work. The gym had a class at that time, and it was a group of people a lot like me, men and women my age who wanted to get some exercise and stress relief after a day of work. One of the things the trainer would do with us was some pad work. He would go around to each of us, and would work with us at our own level, calling out punches and we would have to throw those punches at the pads on his hands. There was a pattern to it, once you learned it, and then the challenge was to keep up with him. But sometimes, we would get ahead of him, and mess things up. Then he’d give us a tap on the arm with the pad, and would say, “You’re way ahead of me!”

    I thought about that with regard to today’s Gospel reading. After professing the fact that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, Saint Peter in classic Saint Peter fashion takes Jesus to task for teaching them that he, the Son of Man, “must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.” Peter was distressed at hearing that Jesus, the one who he just a few verses ago, said was the Christ, would talk about suffering, because they never expected the Messiah to have to undergo any such thing. Jesus turns around and says to Peter, “Get behind me…” Just like my boxing trainer, he is trying to teach them something, but Peter is way ahead of him.

    And that’s no place for a disciple to be. Because disciples don’t get ahead of their master, they follow him. When you’re ahead of the teacher, you can’t learn anything. When you’re following him, you can see what he does, hear what he’s saying, and learn things that lead to life. This is a very important observation, that I have to tell you, came from praying through the Gospel reading at this week’s staff meeting.

    Here’s why this is so important: because Jesus wants the disciples to follow, wants us to follow. He says quite plainly:

    “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
    take up his cross, and follow me.
    For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
    but whoever loses his life for my sake
    and that of the gospel will save it.”

    He’s making it very clear here that winning the kingdom, saving our lives for eternity, means suffering in this life. He was going to model that for them on the way to the Cross, and into the glory of the Resurrection. But if we are way ahead of him, we are absolutely going to be on the wrong road.

    So we are called, by the very words of our Savior, to take up our cross and follow him. That wasn’t just for Saint Peter and the other Apostles; it is for all Jesus’ disciples, including ourselves. There is no other way to the salvation for which we yearn. Following Jesus will ultimately lead us to glory if we do it faithfully. But following him will also lead us to the Cross. Yesterday we celebrated that mystery in the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. Yes, we will suffer in this life, in all sorts of ways, yes we will die, but that death will release us to the glory of the resurrection, if we embrace it in faith.

    In our world, suffering is looked upon as something to be avoided at all costs. Commercials on television and social media promise all sorts of relief if we will take this or that pill. Worse than that, people are legislating circumstances for when it’s appropriate to kill ourselves through euthanasia so that we won’t have to suffer, and pro-abortion people want to say it’s okay to abort a baby who has the wrong chromosomes or might suffer in any way. We avoid suffering in every way we possibly can, so it might be hard to get behind this Jesus who says that the way to heaven is to take up the cross, to suffer, to die, and to follow his lead.

    The psalmist sums it up for us today. Yes, the suffering in our lives leads us to experience the cords of death that encompass us. We often fall into distress and sorrow. But when we embrace that suffering and call on the Lord, we will find ourselves freed of death and able to walk before the Lord in the land of the living. We who have embraced and remembered and celebrated the mystery of Christ’s presence in our lives, in our Church and in our world, can approach suffering with great faith. Some years ago now, there was a contemporary Christian song that said “sometimes he calms the storm, and other times he calms his child.” God won’t always make our tears and pain go away. But he does promise that we will never go through them alone.

    The real truth of life in this world is that there is suffering, and none of us gets a free pass. Even Mary, full of grace, had to watch her Son suffer and die. Even Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and he himself suffered a terrible, painful, humiliating death. None of us gets out of this life unscathed. In some crazy sense, we all are united in the fact that we all suffer, some time and for something. And so it is in fact audacious and even offensive that Saint Peter rebukes our Lord for talking about suffering. Peter himself will suffer a similar fate as that of his Lord, being crucified upside-down. Every one of us, in some way, has to take up the cross and walk with it, because it is only in doing that that we can make our way to the Resurrection.

    And we have to acknowledge, friends, is that we have it a lot easier than our Lord did. We just bear our own suffering; he had to take with him the suffering of every person embroiled in sin in all of time. We have him to help us take up our crosses and to help make those crosses lighter; he had no one except for Simon of Cyrene who helped him begrudgingly. His death had to blast open the gates of heaven; we will just get to walk through it, if we follow him and live the gospel.

    And so, we weak ones who don’t love suffering, we must hear the words that Jesus spoke to Simon Peter spoken also to us. Don’t get ahead of me; take up your cross and follow me.

    For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
    but whoever loses his life for my sake
    and that of the gospel will save it.

  • Good Friday of the Passion of Our Lord

    Good Friday of the Passion of Our Lord

    Today’s readings

    These holy days, this Sacred Paschal Triduum, are all about the Cross. In these moments, the cross takes center stage: it is, in fact the focal point of the Gospel. At his birth into our world, he was laid in a wooden manger, that wood that is the precursor of the wood of the cross. Throughout his public ministry, he journeyed to the cross which was the reason for his coming. And today, he mounts the altar of the cross as the priest, the altar, and the lamb of sacrifice, given for us.

    There can be no greater demonstration of God’s love for us than we have in these days. We broken ones, the ones who incurred the sentence of death, have that sentence served by God the Word, the One who was with the father in the beginning, the One through whom all things were made. Our God is just and there is a price for sin. But our God is mercy and there is forgiveness and redemption and salvation.

    Isaiah’s lament in today’s first reading catches us up in the emotion of Good Friday.  The suffering servant’s appearance is so marred, stricken and infirm that we cannot bear to look at him.  Because if we really looked hard enough, we know, in our heart of hearts, that the marring, the strickenness, the infirmity are all ours. All ours! This is a dark hour.  It seems like all is lost. 

    We too will have dark hours of our own.  That’s one of the few guarantees that this fleeting life gives us.  We absolutely will have to bear our own cross of suffering: the illness or death of loved ones, the loss of a job, the splintering of a family, or even the shame of addictive sin.

    It is our brokenness that we see in the suffering servant, our sinfulness on the son of man.  And this suffering one is embodied by our God, Jesus Christ our Savior, who carries all of that nastiness to the cross, and hangs there before us, bleeding and dying and crying out to the Father.  That’s our sin, our death, our punishment – and he bore it all for us.  Who could believe what we have seen?

    And just when it seems like there is nothing left to give, when it seems like all hope is lost, when it seems like death has the upper hand, the soldier thrusts his lance into the side of Christ, and our Jesus gives still more and yet again: he pours forth the life blood and water that plants the seeds of the Church into the barren ground of the earth, guaranteeing the presence of the Lord in the world until the end of time.  Christ our God gives everything he has for us, takes away all that divides us, and performs the saving sacrifice that makes salvation possible for all people.  Our God gives up everything – everything – for love of us.

    We have the eyes of salvation history, we who have grown up in the Church. So we know that the suffering and death of Jesus is not the end of the story.  In the day ahead, we will keep vigil for the Resurrection of the Lord which shatters the hold that sin and death have on us.  We are a people who eagerly yearn for the Resurrection.  We must certainly hope for the great salvation that is ours, and the light and peace of God’s Kingdom.  But not today: today we remember that that salvation was bought at a very dear price, the price of the death of our Savior, our great High Priest.  Today we look back on all of our sufferings of the past or the present, we even look ahead to those that may yet be.  We see all those sufferings in our suffering servant on the cross.  And as we sit here in God’s presence we know that we are never ever alone in those dark hours, that Christ has united himself to us in his suffering and death.  As we come forward to venerate the Cross, we bring with us our own crosses: past, present, and future, and join them to the sufferings of Christ. In these moments, we unite ourselves to him in our own suffering, and walk confidently through it with him, passing the gates of salvation, and entering one great day into God’s heavenly kingdom.

    We adore you, O Christ and we bless you:
    Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

  • The Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I don’t think most of us need to think real hard about what it means to suffer.  We have all had, and will have, more than our share of it.  Whether it’s the illness and even death of loved ones, or our own illnesses, or unemployment, underemployment, and difficulties at our job, or strife in our families, or any one of many other issues, we have all encountered suffering at some level, at some point in our lives.  When we are going through it, it can be hard to find meaning in that suffering.  Why would God let us suffer, or let our loved ones suffer, as they do, and not intervene? What purpose does our pain and sadness serve?

    The reality of suffering is something of a mystery for us.  Today we hear it in our first reading: Job, the innocent man, has been the victim of Satan’s testing: he has lost his family and riches, and has been afflicted physically.  His friends have gathered around and given him all the stock answers as to why he is suffering: that he, or his ancestors, must have sinned and offended God, and so God allowed him to suffer in this way.  But Job rejects that thinking, as we all should: it is offensive.  Even if we accept that our sins have been great, this reduces God to a capricious child who throws away his toys when he tires of them.

    That’s not Job’s God and it’s not our God either.  And we still have that notion of suffering among us, I’m afraid.  Many people think they are being punished by God because of their sins when they are suffering.  And there is some logic to it: our sins do bring on sadness in this life.  Sin does have consequences, and while these consequences are not God’s will for us, they are a result of our poor choices.  But God does not penalize us in this way by willing our suffering.

    In fact, God has such a distaste for our suffering, that he sent his only Son to come and redeem us.  Jesus was one who suffered too, remember: being nailed to the cross, dying for our sins – but even before that, weeping with those who wept for loved ones, lamenting the hardness of heart of the children of Israel, being tempted by the devil in the desert, even understanding the hungry crowd and miraculously providing a meal for them out of five loaves and a couple of fish.  Jesus felt our affliction and suffering personally, and never abandoned anyone engaged in it.

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus is found healing.  First Peter’s mother-in-law, and then those who came to him at sundown.  In this reading, Jesus is a sign of God’s desire to deal with suffering.  We do not deny the presence of suffering and the tragic in our lives, in fact, we do what we can to overcome it.  But while Jesus deals with suffering and cures illnesses in these stories, he doesn’t eliminate all pain from the world.  In the same way, somehow, we deal with the suffering that presents itself to us, and its causes as we can, and are left with the awesome mystery of what remains.

    But the key here is that our God is with us in our suffering, and so we are called to be there for others who are suffering.  Indeed, we are partners with them in their suffering.  That’s how this always works. When we pray, we open the door for our God to walk with us through suffering.  If it’s his will that we be cured or the situation would change, that will happen, but whatever happens, we are not alone in it.  And when others suffer, we are the hands and feet and voice of Jesus as he walks with them in their pain.

    This weekend we kick off our annual diocesan Catholic Ministries Annual Appeal which funds the various ministries of the diocese of Joliet.  We at Saint Mary’s depend on these ministries to help us: educating seminarians like Andrew, our new intern, and our weekend seminarian Matthew; and supporting the efforts of our school and religious education program.  In addition, through the efforts of Catholic Charities, housing is provided for those who are in need, and meals are served to the hungry.  We are blessed that we can come together as a diocese to provide these services, all for the Glory of God.

    We can’t make all of the suffering in the whole world go away.  But we can do the little things that make others’ suffering a little less, helping them to know the healing presence of Christ, together.

  • The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think, as a pastor, the issue I wrestle with most is the suffering that is out there.  People come to me in their suffering, and that is a great privilege, a holy space.  The father in me wants to be able to say a quick prayer and take all the suffering away, but of course, that’s now how this works.  And so I have accompanied parishioners, and even my own family members, as they suffer.  Suffering, unfortunately, is part of our life on earth, and we all do it at some time or another in our lives. 

    A lot of us, truth be told, have the same outlook as Saint Peter.  We don’t want to think about suffering as part and parcel of our life here on earth.  Today’s Gospel tells us that, after leading the Apostles in a little discernment about who Jesus was, Jesus then begins to foretell his own suffering and death.  And we know that that suffering and death was absolutely necessary to pay the price for our sins.  But Peter, and probably the others as well, didn’t want to think about that.  They were still under the thinking about what the Messiah was supposed to be according to Jewish scriptures, and that Messiah wasn’t supposed to suffer and die.  So Peter begins to audaciously rebuke our Lord, and our Lord then rebukes Peter.

    I think this year, we’ve seen an awful lot of suffering.  Many of us have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or have had a loved one pass away from something else during that time, but the pandemic prevented us from accompanying them.  Others have lost massive amounts of business during that time or suffered financially from the economic downturn.  Even if none of that touched our lives, the pandemic affected the way we live from day to day.  Grandparents couldn’t hug their grandchildren.  We were not able to travel or visit loved ones near or far.  Many couldn’t come to church, even when things opened up a bit, and had to avoid large gatherings or public places of any kind due to a concern about their immunity.  We had to re-think absolutely everything we did, and frankly we still are.

    This weekend, I think too, about where I was twenty years ago.  We all remember that fateful, horrible, 9-11 day, when it seemed like the world was crashing down around us.  Nobody traveled in those days either.  In those days, we had to re-think the way we did so many things, and we don’t take our safety for granted in the ways we did before that day.  We also continue to remember the loss of so many people in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania – people whose lives ended quickly at the start of a workday, and those who gave their lives to help others.  There was more than enough suffering to go around on that horrible day.

    And all of that is to say nothing about the day-to-day suffering we all experience.  The illness and loss of loved ones; the brokenness of our families; the loss of a job or opportunity; the effects of sin and addiction, whether our own or that of those close to us.  The list goes on and on.  The real truth of life in this world is that there is suffering, and none of us gets a free pass.  Even Mary, full of grace, had to watch her Son suffer and die.  Even Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and he himself suffered a terrible, painful, humiliating death.  None of us gets out of this life unscathed.  In some crazy sense, we all are united in the fact that we all suffer, some time and for something.

    And so it is in fact audacious and even offensive that Saint Peter rebukes our Lord for talking about suffering.  Peter himself will suffer a similar fate as that of his Lord, being crucified upside-down.  Every one of us, in some way, has to take up the cross and walk with it, because it is only in doing that that we can make our way to the resurrection.

    I remember a time when I was going through a very difficult time in my priesthood.  One of my good friends came to visit me and brought me a wood carving of Jesus carrying the Cross.  She told me that she hoped it would help me pray through that difficult time and would help me to take up my own cross, as Jesus said we must in today’s Gospel.  Her prayers, and those of so many others, buoyed me up during that time, and reflecting on the Cross made me realize that I had to be there right then, and had to trust our Lord to bring me where I needed to go.

    And the truth of this, friends, is that we have it a lot easier than our Lord did.  We just bear our own suffering; he had to take with him the suffering of every person embroiled in sin in all of time.  We have him to help us take up our crosses and to help make those crosses lighter; he had no one except for Simon of Cyrene who helped him begrudgingly.  His death had to blast open the gates of heaven; we will just get to walk through it, if we follow him and live the gospel.

    Jesus never ever promised to make all our suffering go away.  But he did promise never to abandon us, and he did engage in suffering when he chose to come to earth.  That, friends, is our salvation.  So we have to suffer in this world, we have to deny ourselves and take up the crosses that lay before us.  Because that is the way to follow our Lord who beckons us to come to him.

    For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
    but whoever loses his life for my sake
    and that of the gospel will save it.

  • The Third Sunday of Lent

    The Third Sunday of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Most of us have probably experienced at least one time in our lives when it seemed like our whole world was turned upside-down.  If not, we certainly will.  It might be the loss of a job, or the illness or death of a loved one, or any of a host of other issues.  It always feels like the rug is pulled out from under us and that everything we believed in is toppled over.  Kind of like like the story we just heard in the Gospel.

    You may have heard the interpretation of this rather shocking Gospel story that says that this is proof that Jesus got angry just like we all do, so we shouldn’t feel bad when we do.  That sounds nice, but I am, of course, going to tell you this interpretation is ridiculous in its inaccuracy.  First of all, there is a big difference between the kind of righteous indignation that Jesus felt over the devastation of sin and death that plagues our world, and the frustration and anger that we all experience over comparatively completely insignificant issues from time to time.  Sure, it might make us feel better to think that Jesus acted out in the same way that we sometimes do, that he felt the same way we do about these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

    So feeling better for being angry isn’t the theme of this reading, or the intent of today’s Liturgy of the Word.  Let’s just get that straight right now.  And I do think we have to take all of the readings of the Liturgy of the Word as a whole in order to discern what we are being invited to experience.  Our first reading is extremely familiar to us all.   The ten commandments – we’ve heard them so often, violated them on occasion or maybe constantly; perhaps we don’t even think they’re relevant any more: a quaint reminder of a bygone morality.  But the mere fact that they are read at today’s Mass tells us that the Church says they are relevant and we need to live them.  And while every one of them is certainly important, one of them stands out as having top billing.  And that one is the very first commandment: “I, the LORD, am your God … you shall not have other gods besides me.”

    That one commandment comprises the whole first paragraph of the reading, a total of thirteen lines of text.  I think that means we are to pay attention to it!  Even a quick reading gives us the impression that this commandment is the most foundational.  We have to get our relationship with God right and put him first.  But this commandment is also rather easy to violate, and I think we do it all the time.  We all know that there are things we put way ahead of God: our work, our leisure, sports and entertainment, and so many things that are even be darker than that.  Don’t we often forget to bring God into our thoughts and plans?  Yet if we would do it on a regular basis, God promises to bless us “down to the thousandth generation!”

    Saint Paul is urging the Corinthians to put God first, too.  He complains that the Jews want signs and the Greeks want some kind of wisdom, but he and the others preach Christ crucified!  We are a people who want signs.  We almost refuse to take a leap of faith unless we have some overt sign of God’s decision.  And we are all about seeking wisdom, mostly in ourselves.  If it makes sense to us and it feels right to us, it must be okay to do.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  We get tripped up in our own wisdom and sign-seeking all the time, then we wander down the wrong path only to end up several years down the road, wondering where it all went wrong.

    And then we have the really challenging vignette at the end of the Gospel reading.    Jesus knows how long it took to build the temple.  But he wasn’t talking about the temple building.  He was talking about  the Temple that is his body.  His body is the new Temple, and that was the Temple that would be torn down and in three days raised back up.  Because Jesus is the new Temple, none of the money changing and animal selling was necessary.  It was all perfectly legitimate commerce for the old temple worship.  But worshipping the new Temple – Jesus Christ – would require none of that, and so he turns it all upside-down.

    It’s not easy to put God first.  It’s not easy to glory in Christ crucified.  What a horribly difficult and unpopular message to have to live!  But that’s what we are all called to do if we are to be disciples of Jesus, if we are to yearn for life in that kingdom that knows no end.  Glorying in Christ crucified, putting God first, that’s going to require that some time or another, we are going to have to take up our own cross too, and let our entire lives be turned upside-down.  God only knows where that will lead us: maybe to a new career, maybe to a fuller sense of our vocation, maybe to joy, maybe to pain.  But always to grace, because God never leaves the side of those who are willing to have their lives turned upside-down for his glory.

    There’s no easy road to glory.  You don’t get an Easter without a Good Friday.  Jesus didn’t, and we won’t either.  Our lives will be turned upside-down and everything we think we know will be scattered like the coins on the money-changers’ tables.  But God is always and absolutely present to those who pray those words the disciples recalled:

    Zeal for your house will consume me.

  • The Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It doesn’t take too much of our imagination to think of examples of suffering, having been through the last year of our lives.  All of us can probably think of someone we know who has suffered from COVID-19, or at least the scare of it, and many of us know of those who have died from the disease.  It has affected almost every aspect of our lives from the prospect of hugging our loved ones to eating out at a favorite restaurant.  Many have been affected economically in the last year, businesses closing, many people becoming unemployed.  Add to that the racial injustice, social unrest, political rancor, violence in our cities, and the reality of suffering is very real for all of us.

    Suffering, though, is something of a mystery to us.  Today we hear it in our first reading: Job, the innocent man, has been the victim of Satan’s testing: he has lost his family and riches, and has been afflicted physically.  His friends have gathered around and given him all the popular answers of that time and place as to why he is suffering: namely, that he, or his ancestors, must have sinned and offended God, and so God allowed him to suffer in this way.  But Job rejects that thinking, as we all should: it is offensive.  Our sins have no doubt been huge, but this kind of thinking reduces God to a capricious child who throws away his toys when he tires of them.

    That’s not Job’s God and it’s not our God either.  I’d like to say that we have eliminated that notion of why suffering happens, but sadly it persists.  Many people think they are being punished by God because of their sins when they are suffering.  And there is some logic to it: our sins do bring on sadness in this life.  Sin does have consequences, and while these consequences are not God’s will for us, they are a result of our poor choices.  But let us be clear that God does not penalize us in this way by willing our suffering.

    In fact, God has such a distaste for our suffering, that he sent his only Son to come and redeem us.  Jesus was one who suffered too, remember: being nailed to the cross, dying for our sins – but even before that, weeping with those who wept for loved ones, lamenting the hardness of heart of the children of Israel, being tempted by the devil in the desert, even understanding the hungry crowd and miraculously providing a meal for them out of five loaves and a couple of fish.  Jesus felt our affliction and suffering personally, and never abandoned anyone engaged in it.

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus is found healing.  First Peter’s mother-in-law, and then those who came to him at sundown.  In this reading, Jesus is a sign of God’s desire to deal with suffering.  As Christians, we acknowledge the suffering in our midst, we do what we can to alleviate it, and we give it to our God who does not will our suffering, but who walks with us through it when it comes up in our lives.  Jesus doesn’t alleviate all pain from the world; some of that just persists.  But he never abandons those who are suffering: he didn’t in his earthly life and he doesn’t now.  We must do all that we can, in his Name, to alleviate the suffering of others, and then we must trust that our God who loves us beyond our imagining, will take care of the suffering that remains in the unfolding of eternity.

    But the key here is that we care for those who suffer.  Indeed, we are partners with them in their suffering.  This weekend we kick off our annual diocesan Catholic Ministries Annual Appeal which funds the various ministries of the diocese of Joliet.  We at Saint Mary’s depend on these ministries to help us: educating seminarians like Frank, our new intern and Deacon John; and supporting the efforts of our school and religious education program.  In addition, through the efforts of Catholic Charities, housing is provided for those who are in need, and meals are served to the hungry.  Catholic Charities has partnered with us to bring the food trucks to our parish to help serve our hungry neighbors, especially during this pandemic.  We are blessed that we can come together as a diocese to provide these services, to “Shine the Light of Christ” on those who are in need.  You have received a mailing from the diocese about the Catholic Ministries Annual Appeal over the last few weeks.  I ask you to join me in being as generous as you are able to be in this difficult time.

    We can’t make all of the suffering in the whole world go away.  But we can do the little things that make others’ suffering a little less, helping them to know the healing presence of Christ, together.

  • Thursday of the Thirty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Thirty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Let’s be honest; we want it to be easy, this spiritual life, this journey to the kingdom.  We look longingly for signs that we’re headed the right way; we want more than anything to know we’ll end up in the right place.  And so we pay attention, sometimes, when people say, “Look, there he is,” or “Look, here he is.”  We let ourselves get distracted by people who seem important or things that promise some kind of easy comfort.  But none of that is the Kingdom of God.

    In himself, our Jesus has shown that the journey will not be an easy one.  He himself suffered greatly and was even rejected by his own generation.  If the Son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, if even he would embrace suffering and rejection as a pathway to glory, then we have to be ready to do the same.  He never expects us to trod a path that he wouldn’t – didn’t – do himself.  So we need to be ones who embrace the spiritual life, with all its frustrations, suffering, and pain, so that one day we who have joined our sufferings to Christ, might be one with him in glory.

    And Jesus points out that this really should be easy; certainly easier than we’re making it.  The Kingdom of God is among us, if we would take the time to observe it, if we would open ourselves up to enter into it.  Even if the Kingdom seems cloaked from our current view, we must not give in to temptation.  We must stay the course, live in the moment, be true to our calling as disciples.  For then we cannot fail to enter into the Kingdom.

  • The Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I often wonder how people get through the hard times of their lives if they don’t have faith.  We can all probably think of a time in our lives when we were sorely tested, when our lives were turned upside-down, and, looking back, we can’t figure out how we lived through it except for the grace of our faith.  During the course of my priesthood, I have been present to a lot of people who were going through times like that: whether it be illness or death of a loved one, relationship struggles, job issues, or financial struggles, or a host of other maladies.  Some of them had faith, and some who didn’t.  It was always inspirational to see how people with faith lived through their hard times, and very sad to see how many who didn’t have faith just broken when their lives stopped going well.

    That’s the experience that today’s Liturgy of the Word puts before us, I think.  Let’s look at the context.  In last week’s Gospel, Jesus has cured two people miraculously.  He actually raised Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter from the dead, and he cured the hemorrhagic woman, who had been suffering for twelve years.  So both stories had occurrences of the number twelve, reminiscent of the twelve tribes of Abraham, and later the Twelve Apostles, both of which signify the outreach of God’s presence into the whole world.  So those two miraculous healings last week reminded us that Jesus was healing the whole world.

    But this week, we see the exception.  This week, Jesus is in his hometown, where he is unable to do much in the way of miracles except for a few minor healings.  Why?  Because the people lacked faith.  And this is in stark contrast to last week’s healings where Jairus handed his daughter over to Jesus in faith, and the hemorrhagic woman had faith that just grasping on to the garments of Jesus would give her healing.  Faith can be very healing, and a lack of it can be stifling, leading eventually to the destruction of life.

    We see that clearly in the first two readings.  First Ezekiel is told that the people he would be ministering to would not change, because they were obstinate.  But at least they’d know a prophet had been among them.  Contrast that with Saint Paul’s unyielding faith in the second reading to the Corinthian Church.  Even though he begged the Lord three times to relieve him of whatever it was that was his thorn in the flesh, he would not stop believing in God’s goodness.  Much has been said about what Saint Paul could possibly mean by this “thorn.”  Was it an illness or infirmity?  Was it a pattern of sin or at least a temptation that would not leave him alone?  We don’t know for sure, but this “thorn” makes Saint Paul’s story all the more compelling for us who have to deal with our own “thorns” in our own lives.  Saint Paul’s faith led him to be content with whatever weakness or hardship befell him, and he came to know that in his weakness, God could do more and thus make him stronger than he could be on his own. That assurance gives us hope of the same grace in our own struggles.

    We people of faith will be tested sometimes; that’s when the rubber hits the road for our faith.  Knowing of God’s providence, we can be sure that he will lead us to whatever is best.  And our faith can help us to make sense of the struggles and know God’s presence in the dark places of our lives.  People of faith are tested by the storms and tempests of the world, but are never abandoned by our God.  Never abandoned.

  • The Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Our readings today, I think, are very poignant and to the point.  As a pastor, I see a lot of suffering, and it breaks my heart when my parishioners are going through hard times.  Whether those hard times are brought about by death or sickness, or by relationship problems, or by poverty or job circumstances, or whatever it is, those hard times can be a real test of faith. The very first words of today’s Liturgy of the Word reach out and grab us: “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”  And perhaps we already knew that.  Perhaps we know that God does not intend our death or our suffering, but the really hard thing for us is that he permits it.  Why is that?  Why would God permit his beloved ones to suffer so much here on earth? This is one of those sticky questions that sometimes make people doubt their faith.

    When I was in seminary, I worked as a fire chaplain the last couple of years.  We were called out one wintry night, just before Christmas break, to speak to some medics who had extracted a nine-year old child from a badly mangled car, only to have the child die on the way to the hospital.  These medics were from a neighboring fire department, so we didn’t know them, and I didn’t have too much hope that the conversation would go well. But, to my surprise, these men did open up and expressed the frustration they felt.  One of the men was Catholic and he was the one who had the task of extracting the child from the car.  His enduring question was, why did this innocent child have to suffer and die?  It was a long evening of conversation that really centered around faith that provided some consolation, although it could never really erase their sadness.

    Which brings us to today’s Gospel.  Two people reach out in very different ways to end suffering and provide healing.  One is a man, who approaches Jesus and falls at his feet, begging the teacher to heal his daughter.  The other is a woman, who dares not make herself known, who sneaks up behind Jesus to touch his clothing.  The situations were different, but what unites them is their faith.  They have faith that reaching out to Jesus in their own way will bring them the healing they desire.

    And there was a pretty serious leap of faith involved for the hemorrhaging woman.  Touch was her enemy.  She had suffered much at the hands of many doctors.  Not only have their ministrations failed to heal her, but they have also left her penniless.  And to touch anyone in her state of ritual impurity makes them ritually unclean too.  So she is totally marginalized: she is a woman in a patriarchal society, afflicted by an enduring and debilitating illness, she has no money to take care of herself, and she is unable to be part of the community or participate in worship.  Things could not have been worse.  Finding the courage to reach out to Jesus, even in her impure state, she is healed by her faith.

    Now please note that that same faith was lacking in the people who were attending to Jairus’s daughter.  Even if they believed that Jesus could cure her illness, she is now dead, and so his assertion that she is merely “sleeping” meets with ridicule and scorn.  So Jesus has to throw out the faithless ones so that they would no longer be an obstacle.  The child cannot reach out to Jesus so he reaches out to her, taking her hand, and raising her up.

    So it’s as simple as that.  An act of faith on the part of the hemorrhaging woman and the synagogue official provide healing and restore life. But how realistically does that match our experience?  I am guessing that those medics threw up a prayer or two in addition to all of the life-saving actions they performed on that nine-year old when he was in the ambulance with them, but the boy still died.  How many of us have prayed faithfully, constantly, only to be met by seemingly deaf ears?  We don’t even have the same opportunity as Jairus and the hemorrhaging woman.  We can’t reach out and touch Jesus in the flesh.  So I would never stand here and tell you that one simple act of faith is all it takes to make all your problems go away.  I always say that faith is not a magic wand.

    But I will also say this: as I have walked with people who have suffered, those who have reached out to Jesus in faith have not gone unrewarded.  Maybe their suffering continued in some way, or even in some cases got worse, but in Christ they found the strength to walk through it with dignity and find peace.  Maybe Jesus won’t always stop the bleeding of our hurts and inadequacies and woundedness.  But through his own blood, he will always redeem us.  We who are disciples need to make those acts of faith if we are to live what we believe.  For those medics I spent the evening with, the conversation of faith didn’t bring the boy back, but it did provide them with healing and peace and a sense that in God’s time, all would be made right.

    I am struck by the Eucharistic imagery at the end of today’s Gospel.  Jesus comes to the home of Jairus and finds his daughter asleep in death.  He reaches out to her, touches her, and raises her up.  Then he instructs those around her to give her something to eat.  We gather for this Eucharistic banquet today and Jesus comes to us, finding us asleep in the death of our sins.  Because we are dead in our sins, we can hardly reach out to touch our Lord, but he reaches out to us.  He takes our hands, raises us up, and gives us something to eat.

    We come to the Eucharist today with our lives in various stages of grace and various stages of disrepair.  At the Table of the Lord, we offer our lives and our suffering and our pain.  We bring our faith, wherever we are on the journey, and reach out in that faith to touch the body of our Lord.  We approach the Cup of Life, and whatever emptiness is in us is filled up with grace and healing love, poured out in the blood of Christ.  As we go forth, glorifying the Lord by our lives this day, all of our problems may very well stay with us, remaining unresolved at least to our satisfaction.  Our suffering and pain may very well be with us still.  But in our faith, perhaps they can be transformed, or at least maybe we can be transformed so that we can move through that suffering and pain with dignity and find peace.  And as we go forth, perhaps we can hear our Lord saying to us the same words he said to the woman with the hemorrhage: go in peace, your faith has saved you.

  • Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    The story is quickly coming to its climax. Jesus’ claims of divinity are really starting to rile the Jews. They have placed their hope in Abraham and the prophets – great men to be sure – but seem to have forgotten about the promise of a Messiah, and so they totally miss the Christ who is standing right in front of them. It’s an extremely sad situation. But it is also quickly becoming dangerous for Jesus. These are the ones who will stir up the trouble at his trial and get them to release Barabbas, putting Jesus on the cross instead.

    And I feel like it’s necessary to make a quick aside here. We have heard and will hear many references to “the Jews” in John’s Gospel. This wording was used for centuries to make anti-Semitic comments and policies seem like they are legitimate, blaming the Jews for killing the Lord. But this is John’s Gospel, and Jesus is in full control. He knows what is in their hearts. The Jews may indeed want to take his life, but Jesus instead willingly lays it down. Because that was his mission; that is his mission – to give himself completely for our salvation, and the salvation of the whole world. And honestly, if we want to blame someone for sending Jesus to the cross, we know only too well that we don’t have to look any further than our own sinful hearts.

    What we see in today’s Liturgy of the Word, ultimately, is that God made a promise to Abraham, and, in the person of Jesus Christ, kept that promise. Abraham was made a mighty nation, God’s promises have always been kept, and we have salvation in Christ. That’s our Good News today, and every day really. As we enter the somber days ahead, we have the joy of keeping the end of the story clearly in mind, that Resurrection that Abraham himself so longed to see.