5th Sunday Lent C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2016

All I want is to know Christ … and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death. Was Paul a masochist, asking for suffering? I doubt it. I think that he knew that suffering in some shape or other is inevitable. It comes with life. I have suffered; you have suffered; Jesus certainly suffered; and so did Paul. But Paul also recognized that, depending on how we respond to suffering, it can either destroy us or build us up. He wanted to respond to the inevitable sufferings of life in the way that Jesus did, reproducing the pattern of his death. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews was of the opinion that Jesus became perfect through the way that he responded to suffering.

Paul was not thinking so much of Jesus’ physical suffering. I presume he did not want to be crucified like Jesus. Rather he wanted to respond to the inner challenges occasioned by the sufferings of life just as Jesus did – particularly as evidenced in the ways Jesus approached his death. What was the mental anguish of the condemned Christ? And what was his response?  As Jesus faced into his death, his mission had failed. Few people believed. The religious hierarchy, particularly, had let him down, refusing to believe and, with him, to lead people further into the mystery of God. They were rather the ones who determined his execution. His special group of twelve, on whom he totally relied, had disowned and deserted him; one of them in fact had betrayed him; and their leader had even denied ever having known him. In face of such abject absence of faith, he could have responded with bitterness and despair, and certainly refused to forgive their hardness of heart and blindness. Instead, he chose to keep to his message of mercy and love, to continue somehow to trust God, to hope always in people, somehow, and even offer forgiveness to his murderers and treacherous former friends. He became perfect through suffering.

Is there anything pertinent to our lives and present situation we can learn from Paul, and particularly from Jesus? We have just been experiencing the intense gaze of the Royal Commission directed squarely on us as a diocesan Church. A lot of us are reeling, feeling outraged at what has happened in the past, humiliated just by being Catholics, and betrayed by those we looked up to and trusted. That is our reality. We are suffering. A number of our fellow Catholics, even family members, have chosen to walk away, no longer to belong. You and I are here. From the midst of our suffering, how might we reproduce the pattern of Jesus’ death? I do not think it is enough simply to weather the storm, to sit it out, to wish it go away, to avoid the pain and the bewilderment. That is the way of denial. God is present in the midst of all this, calling and enabling us to grow, even to become perfect. For me, that means, among other things, accepting humiliation. We need to respond respectfully and compassionately to victims and their families and friends. We need to support each other. I also believe that we need to seek if and how we have been complicit, and somehow responsible, for creating or accepting the climate that allowed what happened to happen. We need to reform our Church, to seek to understand the presence and power of sin in ourselves and in others, and particularly how sin infiltrates all human institutions, including ours, and blinds us.

Paul wrote, All I want is to know Christ. That, I hope, goes for all of us. We can know Jesus as it were from the outside, looking in. That will not do. Jesus offers us the opportunity to know him from the inside, to share his experience and his emotional anguish. It is how we, like him and with him, become fully alive, sharing his suffering so as to share his resurrection.