Fr Billy Swan
Dear friends. Here in Wexford last Friday week, we marked the annual patron for those buried in the Paupers’s graveyard at Coolcotts. It was a sobering but necessary remembrance of those who died and were buried in unmarked graves from around the time of the famine to the 1930’s. It was humbling to remember these people and to think of what our ancestors endured around the time of the Great Hunger and in the years immediately after. For those who believed in God, it was a time that must have shaken their faith. Where was God in the middle of it all?
This question takes us right to the heart of the problem of suffering and how it can be reconciled with faith in a loving God. The question is not new as we see from the book of Job that today's First Reading is taken from. Job is a righteous man struck down with terrible suffering. It also was a challenge for St Paul who suffered greatly himself and yet was one of the greatest missionaries of all time. Let us listen carefully to what both readings tell us today.
In the first reading, God is responding to Job’s cry about the meaning of his suffering. Note in his response how God does not object to Job asking the question. Rather he reminds him that somehow there is more going on than he can see or understand. There is a bigger picture and a wider context that only God can see.
For St Paul, the apparent contradiction between God’s love and suffering comes together in Christ crucified. For Paul, the God who made heaven and earth is the same God who emptied himself and lowered himself into human experience and human suffering through Jesus Christ. He did this so that he could draw close to those who suffer and save them. This is what love does – it draws close, suffers if necessary and saves the one it loves. We see this in the Gospel with Jesus asleep in the boat as the disciples are struggling, fearful, lost and in danger. Jesus is there with them despite him not acting when they wanted him to. But there he is and act he does, in his own time and way.
So, what might the Word be saying to us? From the first reading from Job, the Lord invites us to keep before us the bigger picture that we don’t always understand but to trust that everything is unfolding under the providence of God, somehow and someway. I remember once meeting a young man who was devasted by his fiancé breaking off their engagement. But soon after he met the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his children. When the first woman rejected him, it seemed like the end of the world. Only later he saw a bigger picture.
From the second reading from St Paul, we keep before us the wounds of Jesus and his passion. And not just his wounds but his love that bore them. Here is the love that overwhelms us according to Paul – a love that speaks to human suffering and that changes us. Finally, the Gospel message is about where our wounded God is intimately present to us, even when we think he doesn’t care and doesn’t act when we think he should.
Friends, these are the times when our faith is severely tested through the storms and trials of every human life and every human community. Do these three readings today offer us definitive answers to the problem of suffering? No. But they do help us to put it in context by reminding us of three important things – that there is a bigger picture that we can’t fully grasp now; that the Lord Jesus is with us as he promised. He too was wounded and knows our suffering from the inside out. We pray that our suffering Church and suffering world might find in these readings new hope to face the many challenges of today.
Comentarios