2nd Sunday of Easter C - Homily 5

 Homily 5 - 2019 

We gather today against the backdrop of a couple of weeks of tragedy and suffering - in New Zealand first and then in Sri Lanka. On Thursday the nation remembered the too many deaths caused by war over the past century. Our focus has been primarily on the numbers of those killed and injured, but less often on those injured survivors left to cope with on-going wounds and destructive psychological trauma. More rarely do we think of those still more numerous ones left to carry on - wives, husbands, parents and children - whose suffering in many cases will be longer-lasting and more intense than of those killed.

How do we respond to all this in ways that are life-giving for others and for ourselves? How do we make sense of it all?

We pray for those who died recently, Christian and Muslim, encouraged that both groups died while in the act of community worship, presumably engaging with the God they trusted in and loved – alert to this world at one moment, consciously pursuing their eternal journey into the infinite heart of God at the next.

The choices facing survivors and anguished family and friends, deprived in an instant of those they loved and on whom they perhaps sorely depended, remain what they have always been – to live each day as before, but to do so now with a wound they would never have anticipated, and facing a question they may never have faced before. Will they use their suffering to turn in on themselves and sadly walk away from God? or will they entrust themselves to the Mystery of Love? Experience shows that suffering can lead in either direction. These perhaps are the ones who most need our prayer.

Today's Gospel reading from St John’s Gospel seemed to emphasise quietly the physically wounded hands, feet and side of the risen Jesus. Despite his physical pain, might not his mental anguish have caused him still greater suffering and distress? All this has had me wondering.

Are we surprised that the Gospel should make so much of the wounds of the risen Christ? We shouldn’t be. If you were present at Good Friday’s Liturgy, you might remember the second Reading of the day, from the Letter to the Hebrews where the author said of Jesus, “He learnt to obey through suffering, and was made perfect."

First of all, I think it is important that we understand what the author meant by “obey”. Normally we think of obeying in an infantile or teen-age way – the somewhat reluctant bowing to the rules or expectations of others in authority. That was not what Jesus was doing. For those who allow themselves to mature, “obeying” refers to the free and love-inspired effort to attune their values and behaviour to those whom they have learnt to love. Jesus became “perfect” by allowing intense suffering to open him completely to the heart and the will of his Father.

"He became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation". Like Christ, we move towards perfection to the extent that we allow life, with its inevitable suffering, sometimes physical but more often mental and emotional, to reveal to us what we truly value, what we truly seek, and to move us, despite the cost, to find the strength to choose what we see fits best with our sense of human dignity and mutual respect. Confused and bewildered though we often are in the face of deep suffering, we can still reach out in hope and trust to the “sweet [sometimes bitter] Mystery of life” that we call God. Our suffering can serve to make us who we most truly are.

No wonder the risen Jesus carried his wounds with him into eternity! Having served as the visible price of his deepest love, having been the context through which be became perfect, effectively they made him become who he truly was.

Our suffering, whatever it be, can do the same.