ORDINARY SUNDAY V “B”
FEBRUARY 7/8, 2009
The experience and sentiments of Job in today’s first reading are ones we can all readily identify with. Watching the DVD accompanying the book “Unnatural Disasters”, chronicling last spring’s killer tornado and the unprecedented flooding in our area, revealed images of total and utter destruction similar to those experienced by Job. Along with those images came memories of the people I ministered to in Parkersburg and here in our parish who, literally, lost every material possession acquired over the course of a lifetime. if we have been fortunate enough not to have suffered such loss, nonetheless, no one of us is immune from difficulty, trial, pain and death. Like Job, we too, are brought low by the weight of suffering, spend sleepless nights, and as a seemingly endless course of dark days stretches before us we too are tempted to despair and hopelessness. Where is God in all this? Why does God allow such things to happen?
It would be gross malpractice for me to claim to have ready, pat answers to such questions. I often ask them myself. So then what can be said? Part of an answer lies in the nature of creation and human life. Both creation and human life while good and beautiful, are finite, limited. Events such as tornadoes and floods are part of the ebb and flow of the natural world. When such occurrences collide with human life and human activity tragic results can occur. Other sufferings in our lives such as disease are also part of nature’s working in us. In some cases, suffering results from choices made by us out of partial or total ignorance, or deliberately, that surface months, years or decades later. Finally, other sufferings are the direct result of selfish, self-serving choices—sin in its many faces. Is there no hope here? Are we by nature condemned to lives of suffering?
To these questions today’s second reading and the gospel shout a resounding No!
St. Paul tells us that in his ministry he has become “all things to all, to save at least some”. What St. Paul is saying is that he willingly accepts any physical or spiritual trial in order that through it by identification with others experiencing difficulty he can lead them to Jesus. St. Paul can hold this ideal up for himself because of Jesus. Jesus fully God and fully human is “all things to all.” God, the third chapter of St. John’s gospel tells us, “loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn.3:16). Jesus came into the world not to explain or take away its tragedies, sufferings and death. He did something far greater. He became “all things to all” by entering fully into our broken human condition and assuming all that burdens us to himself to save not just some of us, but all of us. The cross is the sign of how completely God unites himself to us in Jesus. The Resurrection is the sign of how completely in Jesus we have been once again united to God. In raising Jesus from the dead, God definitively reversed the grip that sin held on the world and our human life. That is the meaning behind the detail in today’s gospel of Jesus walking into the sickroom of Peter’s mother-in-law. In this action we see God fully involving himself in our human condition, its sufferings, by directly confronting illness and “taking her by the hand raising her up.” What Jesus did for Peter’s mother-in-law he offers to do for us, too.
This work of salvation Jesus has entrusted to his Church through the Sacraments. In the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick Jesus enters into the illness and suffering of those who present themselves to him, and through the anointing with blessed oil (an ancient medicinal remedy) accompanied by the sign of the cross “saves and raises up”; assures those anointed, and all of us, that he is with us in our sufferings, and offers us his gift of healing in whatever way is best suited to us now, and ultimately eternal life.
Where is God in our sufferings? He is right here with us! It is to Jesus that we now turn as we pray for and anoint those who present themselves to him for healing today.