Suffering (5th Sunday of Ordinary Time)

Job cries out “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery, shall I not see happiness again”

The Psalmist laments

“My bones burns away like fire.  My heart is withered like the grass.  I cry with all my strength”

To those who suffer, words often aren’t enough and when we try and help our actions are often too little and too late.

Suffering can be so overwhelming that we feel lost and useless.

So, why do we suffer?

Adam & Eve lived in friendship with God, with each other, and with the environment until they chose to put aside loving and trusting God and chose to try and be like him. 

In that choice they lost all that they had been given.   They were cast out of the garden into a world of toil and suffering and death.

In that choice suffering became part of the human condition, our human condition.

To be born human, with all our joy, great gifts and experiences, is to be subject to a physical world bond by its laws.

Natural disasters happen.

We live in physical bodies (of strength and grace) but also bodies that age, get ill and perish.

We live in a social, political, and economic structures that can be good and beneficial to us, but often goes wrong and sometimes horrible so.  

Where there should be a sense of the common good there is greed, where they should be respect, there is prejudice.  Where there should be a culture of life there is a culture of death. 

Where we should be turning to God, we turn away from him. 

And in turning away from God we often blame God.

Why would God do this?  We cry out.

We, like those around Job, often seek simple answers where there are none.

His friends insist that he suffers because he has sinned and that God is punishing him. 

But this doesn’t ring true in Job’s heart.

 Throughout all of his suffering his faith in God is strong.

 It is battered and torn, and stretched thin, but it remains, foreshadowing St Augustine’s words

“All things come to good in God.”

Suffering makes us ask - Why them? Why us? Why me? 

As inheritors of Adam & Eve’s nature we take our chances in a world transformed by sin.   

As Human Beings we have been given the difficult road.

But as Christians we do not despair, for like Job we are not enslaved by suffering or identified with our suffering, but by our freedom and our faith.

 In faith our struggles are never meaningless, our suffering are never meaningless, and our lives are never meaningless.  No life is meaningless.

 Salvation history is a story of God always reaching out to us and finally, out of an unimaginable love sending his son to join us in our humanness and our suffering.

“For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

And this changes everything.

In Jesus Christ, who shared our imperfect humanity, we share God’s prefect divinity.

This does not change of human condition, Christ “the man of Sorrows” Isaiah called him, suffered, felt loneliness, the loss of a beloved friend, betrayal by those around him, hunger, misunderstanding, and death.

But Jesus, trusting the Father, doing what he saw the Father do, embraced his own suffering while at the same time reaching out to others in a compassion that healed and changed lives.

His life was poured out, his suffering was endured, and his death freely accepted, as an offering for our salvation.  

But the work isn’t done and and you and I continue to share in this work of salvation.

Through our baptism we are made one with Christ and so we add our suffering and our work confronting suffering into his continuing work of salvation.

This does not change the nature of suffering, I would be a liar if I said it did, but it does transform our suffering into a fierce grace and means of sanctification.

We I practice what I preach – I hope so, but  St Paul says

“We walk by faith, not by sight” 

Sometimes faith is all we have.  It is our only light in the darkness.

Sometimes we must choose Hope in a world that brings us to despair.

But we do choose and in choosing we turn to Jesus who does not recoil from us.

 He reaches out to us to touch and to heal. 

 Like he did for Peter’s Mother-in-law - He grasps us and raises us up.

There are no simple answers to suffering.

But we can find the fundamental meaning of suffering in Christ.

We look to Jesus’ compassion for strength and resolve to help others and confront suffering wherever we find it.

In Jesus’ perseverance we endure our own suffering with courage and consolation.

In his binding us to himself we are all his brothers and sisters working together for the good of all, and

we are children of God, destined not for suffering but for Joy and not for death, but  for life.

We, like Job, face what comes our way, with all the grace we can muster. 

And through it all we do not succumb to suffering or to despair, but we become witnesses and agents of hope and salvation, and of a love which reaches out to all who suffer.

This is not easy.  This is not cheap grace.

 This is sacrificial love so bright and crystalized that it changes lives and moves mountains.

This Grace comes from Jesus Christ, where the mystery of human suffering meets the mystery of divine love.