Life is Suffering but Christ is Victory: Homily for Sunday, February 4, 2024

Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.

These readings help us to see that even though life is tough, Jesus remains the source of our peace and support. Job finds support in God, and Jesus, even after influencing the whole town reminds us of the power and importance of prayer.

Life is Suffering but Christ is Victory

There was a couple who welcomed lovingly their newborn, only to discover a few days later that she had a massive tumor on her lung. There was a mother who routinely let her daughter go out to ride her bike. Her daughter was 12 or 13. But one day, when she was out riding her bike, her daughter was murdered.

There are people who go to the doctor when they’re not feeling well, and they get a life-changing diagnosis. They have some kind of serious or terminal disease. There is the person who loses their job. There is the person whose relationship, maybe even out of the blue, comes to an end. Something they don’t desire. Loved ones die. Personal problems become something difficult for us to deal with. Life can seem like a drudgery.

We can ask, “What’s it all about?” We certainly ask much of the time when these magnificent and awesomely difficult events come crashing into our lives. We certainly ask, “Where is God in the midst of all of this?” And it’s in the midst of these events that we have to ask ourselves, “Where is God in this?” And what is my attitude toward God?

We don’t know the level of historicity of this person, Job, but we do know the value and purpose of the story. In fact, some modern Scripture scholars say that the book of Job is actually mirroring the stages that became all the rage in the ’70s, and some new thing that had been discovered, the stages of death and dying of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Because we see all of the same things, many scholars have pointed this out, in the book of Job as it has this pattern of life.

But what does Job do in the midst of all of this suffering? He loses absolutely every aspect of blessing, apparently, in his life. And his wife is no consolation in the midst of all this loss. She simply says to him, “Curse God and die,” because that was the penalty for blasphemy. Medieval scholars actually didn’t like the word “curse God and die,” so they changed it to “bless God and die,” which made absolutely no sense. Because they said, “But you can’t curse God.”

But she said, “Curse God and die.” She said, “Get it over with.” Why do you cling to this belief in God? Look at all these horrible things that have happened to you. And yet, what does Job do? Even in his anger, even in his questioning, even in his doubt, he continues to believe in God. He even says something I don’t think I could say. “Will we accept good things from the Lord? Should we not also accept evil?”

That’s a tough question. I’m much more inclined to be on the side of his wife, if truth be told. But what happens in the midst of it? In the very end, Job is commended, as we’re told, we didn’t get it in this reading, for speaking the truth about God.

And despite all of the friendships that try to convince him he must have done something to deserve these things, he has to intervene on the part of his friends and not the other way around. I would suggest that that’s why we come here. I would further suggest that’s why we pray.

Sometimes I think our reaction, when we face some kind of difficulty or we see some problem or something that is in our lives, our first inclination is to want to fix it. But I would argue that’s not the gospel message.

The primary commandment is to love God. And then from that commandment comes loving our neighbor. But sometimes I think we want to turn it the other way around. We want to start with loving our neighbor in hopes that that will lead us to love God. But Jesus is very clear. The greatest and the most important commandment is to love God with everything we have.

I think the reason we like to start with the love of neighbor thing is because it leaves us with some sense of control. You see, if I can do something, I can feel like I have some control over what might be very uncontrollable in my life.

But if we look at the heroes of the Bible and the heroes of the lives of the saints, we see that what is really heroic is that they’re able to stand before God and wait. Wait for God to move their hearts to do something. Wait for God to do something to help heal brokenness and difficulty and hardships.

You see, the hard part I think with prayer, particularly silent prayer, is that it often exposes our areas of brokenness, our difficulties, our hardships, those ways in which we have added to the brokenness of the world or to others, and that’s not very comfortable.

The other thing is that God works in God’s time. We have a word for that. The Greeks have a word for that. We see it in the Bible. It’s kairos, God’s time. It’s the time of readiness or the time when things are fitting to occur. Jesus came when it was fitting for him to enter into human history.

In our culture today, we focus a lot more on chronos, which is the calendar, the watch, the appointment book, etc. What do we mean by that, though? St. Teresa of Avila had what is kind of glibly often times referred to as the “dark night of the soul.”

It wasn’t a few days. It wasn’t a few weeks. It wasn’t a few months. It wasn’t even a few years. It was decades that God was silent. But she was faithful.

We learned from Mother Teresa that much of her own faith life, God was silent. But she was faithful. I was told the story, I wasn’t there, but somebody claims to have been there, when she was at a dinner and there was a young person who obviously was just so over excited that he was in the presence of Mother Teresa that he couldn’t stop gushing about her.

But at one point she said, “You have been so successful.” And then Mother Teresa reacted. It was very interesting. That was the phrase. All the anger goes over to the poor. It’s so wonderful you do all this work. You’re with the people who need you the most, etc. But she didn’t react to any of that. She reacted to the word “successful.” And she said this, “I have not been called by God to be successful. I have been called by God to be faithful.”

It’s interesting. Everything she did came from that fidelity to God and what she believed God was calling her to do. And if God immediately called her to do something else and to leave behind everything, she would have gone to where God was calling her to be.

The Gospel also helps us to understand this tension between activity and fidelity. Jesus has healed the mother-in-law of Simon and Andrew. What a wonderful thing. How great. How miraculous. And it must have made a tremendous impact because the whole town then comes with all their problems. And it’s easy to understand that they would have come.

If we were in today’s world, the PR analyst would have said to Jesus, “This is perfect. You’ve got to capitalize on this moment. Your popularity is sky high.” Jesus doesn’t stay. What does he do? He doesn’t heal more and more and more people because he could. What does the Gospel say?

He gets up very early before dawn, leaves, and goes off to a deserted place and prays. He doesn’t maximize the level of his activity. He models for us the importance of our relationship with God. I think the need of our age today is contemplation.

It is not to focus on what we can do as much as focusing on who we are called to be. It’s a subtle difference in some ways because we’re called to be people who serve our neighbor. We’re called to love our neighbor. This isn’t to suggest that all of the things that Christians and Catholics do in the name of loving neighbor is wrong.

It’s to suggest the importance of the priority. That everything we do to serve the poor comes first out of love of God and out of his call. I would also offer a second observation. At least it’s the way that I’m trying to live my life today for my own mental health, if for nothing else.

We need, when we come here, when we gather together, when we do all the things that we do, needs to be an experience that is dramatically different than everything that occurs out there. What do I mean? Look at our society. We are fighting, we are arguing, we are angry, we can’t even solve the most basic of political problems because we yell at each other and we do all these kinds of things. That’s not a political statement about anybody.

I don’t think you need to look very far to see that I’m right about that. If the same thing, if we look the same way in here, well dear God, I don’t need any more conflict and division in my life. I’ve got enough of it out there. Can we offer a relationship with Jesus so that the things and situations that I mentioned at the beginning of this homily and others as well, I believe that I can find some peace, some support, some love, some care.

Can I find a place where even if people disagree with me, they seek to get to know me and to understand me? Can I find a place where people are so committed to living like Jesus that it’s attractive to me? That I want what they want. Can we be those people that people look at the value and witness of our lives and say, “That’s what I want.” What they have, I want. Can we model this relationship?

I would suggest the greatest human need right now, which is playing itself out in a lot of different ways that are not important, but particularly everything that we know about young adults and younger, is that there’s a craving for authentic, inter-personal relationship. What’s been offered for all of us, it’s not just a young person’s thing. Go out to any public place and you’ll see that this is not something that happens only to a certain age or generation.

I think the biggest threat we face right now is the belief that we can have authentic, inter-personal relationship through a screen. I think it’s deadly for us. First of all, we only present ourselves at our best. Because we get to choose what other people get to see. It is a black hole of time, and I think most of us probably underestimate the amount of time we waste on it.

But it isn’t authentic. It isn’t authentic. We need to model today what Jesus wants us to do in our lives. And so maybe today, maybe tomorrow, and so maybe today, maybe it doesn’t mean rising early before dawn. I certainly would find that a challenge. But going off to a deserted place, praying, and resting in the love of God is something all of us need to find more time for.

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