Our actions – even the righteous ones – have consequences. Jeremiah famously complains in our first reading today that his reward for speaking the truth was that every influential person in the land plotted to take his life just to shut him up. And the sons of Zebedee – James and John – find out that being a disciple does mean that they will have to drink the chalice that Christ will drink, but what they don’t know yet is that the chalice he’s talking about is a cup of suffering, which they will certainly share. As we take the Body and Blood of Christ today, we too might wonder what the chalice will bring for us, and how we will respond to it.
Tag: suffering
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Thursday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time
[display_podcast]Sometimes, it seems, we think that God is too big to deal with our paltry little problems. In thinking that way, though, we make God out to be quite a bit smaller than he really is. We want to define God, just like Peter did. We want him to be our Messiah, but the Messiah of our own desires. Peter couldn’t conceive of a Messiah who would have to suffer. We can’t conceive of a Messiah who wouldn’t do everything we ever asked him to, who wouldn’t make our life deliriously happy, who wouldn’t make all our problems go away. Or else we think our Messiah is too busy to even be concerned with our lives. Either way, we are selling our Messiah way short.
Jesus says our Messiah “must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.” He will walk through the pain with us, and sometimes that pain will go away, sometimes it won’t, but the pain will never be ignored. Our God is not too big to note our suffering, and is never too big to walk through it with us. But he’s not small enough to be our genie in a bottle, waving the magic wand to make us do what he wants.
The Lord hears the cry of the poor, the Psalmist tells us today: “When the poor one called out, the LORD heard, and from all his distress he saved him.” Our Messiah is a God who hears our cry, and knows our suffering. We are never alone in our need.
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St. John Baptist de la Salle
Today's readings | Today's saint
[display_podcast]Our celebration today leads us to two great saints. The first is St. Stephen in today’s first reading. This is really the beginning of the end of his life. His courageous words and steadfast commitment to the truth are beginning to find disfavor among some trouble makers. The members of the “so-called Synagogue of Freedmen” are angry that they could not withstand Stephen’s wisdom, so they are starting to stir up trouble that will eventually lead to Stephen’s execution, but through it all, he finds his glory and peace in Christ.
The second saint is the saint of today’s feast: St. John Baptist de la Salle. John gave up a promising and rewarding career as a scholar-priest at an influential church, complete with a posh life that would take care of him for the rest of his life. And he gave it up to work at a ministry he wasn’t all that excited about: educating young people. Yet, the more he became convinced that this was his life’s calling, the more he dedicated himself to it. He is the founder of the Christian Brothers, who have a ministry of education all over the world, and is the patron of school teachers.
His life resonates with St. Stephen in that he too met up with opposition. He experienced heartrending disappointment and defections among his disciples, bitter opposition from the secular schoolmasters who resented his new and fruitful methods and persistent opposition from the Jansenists of his time, whose heretical doctrines John resisted vehemently all his life.
Dedication to the truth can be a difficult thing to live. There is always opposition to it. But as St. Stephen and St. John Baptist de la Salle show us today, there is also joy and peace in it.
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