A How-To Guide for Tabernacling-Over
14th Sunday of the Year
The Church teaches that evil is the absence of good; that means that evil is not some kind of positive reality you can point toward and say, ‘there is evil’ the way you can point to a stop sign and say, ‘there is a stop sign.’ The only way to point toward evil is to gesture toward something that is missing, something that is not as good as it could be and say, ‘whatever ought to be there but is not there, that is evil.’ To point out evil is like gesturing toward the unfinished masterpiece of an artist who gave up with oil on only half the canvas, and saying ‘the other half, the blank half, that is evil, because it is not as good as it ought to be.’
St. Paul gives us a list of evils in our second reading today.
He talks about weakness, and we don’t know if Paul is talking about moral weaknesses or spiritual weaknesses or physical weaknesses. Maybe Paul is suffering from some kind of vice like lust that causes him to sin; maybe he feels alone at times and abandoned by God; some scholars think that Paul is talking about going blind or the experience of some kind of bodily pain. We don’t know what the ‘thorn in the flesh’ is that Paul is given, but we know it is evil—it is absence of something that ought to exist: maybe the absence of virtue, or the absence of connection with God, or the absence of physical health.
St. Paul also talks about insults as a kind of evil. We know that Paul is constantly criticized and degraded by non-believers during his missionary journeys. Insults are evil because an insult is an absence of the mutual respect that ought to exist between two people.
St. Paul talks about hardships and persecutions. We know that Paul was beaten many times for his evangelizing; some scholars think that Paul died by stoning at Lystra before being returned to life by Christ to continue with his mission. And we know Paul experienced many other kinds of hardships: he struggled to find money to survive, he was shipwrecked multiple times, friends left him, he suffered from hunger and thirst and community betrayal. These kinds of experiences are evil because these experiences are absences of what ought to be: people ought to have money needed to survive, and the ability to travel safely, and good friendship and food and water and rootedness in community.
Finally, St. Paul talks about ‘constraint.’ The original Greek word that Paul uses literally means ‘narrowness of space’. Paul means that he lacks the freedom that he ought to enjoy. He cannot move around easily the way a free citizen ought to be able to move around, he is often put in prison, governments both local and imperial do not recognize the truth of the Gospel.
I wanted to talk about evil and the experiences of St. Paul because what we are given in our second reading today is really a kind of essential formula for deeper union with Christ. Each step of the formula matters, so let me lay these out for you as clearly as I can:
(1) You experience suffering in your life of some kind that causes you pain: maybe physical pain or psychological pain or spiritual pain.
(2) You recognize that the cause of your suffering is some kind of evil—you lack something that you need, whether it is virtue or health or freedom or money or respect or safety; you are missing something that you deserve and that you need to live a good life.
(3) You examine your life and discover that no matter your suffering, somehow you are still living a life marked by goodness; even though you suffer, you continue praying, and worshipping, and living in good relationships with family and friends and community, and you remain a person of great charity who sacrifices constantly for others.
(4) You realize that the cause of the goodness that remains in your life no matter the reality of your suffering is Christ; Christ is the one who sustains you and gives you whatever strength you possess to hang in there and keep praying and loving and sacrificing; you have become dependent on Christ for getting through your day.
(5) You finally recognize that because evil is the absence of something that ought to exist, the experience of evil becomes an opportunity for the grace of Christ to fill the dead spaces of your life; somehow, in mystery, your experience of evil becomes the source of a deeper union with Christ.
The formula for union with Christ that St. Paul discovers in Second Corinthians is important (essential, really) for living the Christian life well. What I want to do now is make some observations about how we get the formula wrong because we live in a world (and a Church) today that makes it very hard for us to manage our suffering well.
(1) Suffering is evil, but sometimes in the Church today we talk about how suffering is good—that is a mistake. Suffering is evil, evil is the absence of good, and so into the dead space of what is missing can exist the grace of Christ. But we cannot make the mistake of identifying suffering as good because then we won’t think there are dead spaces in us that we need Christ to fill.
(2) We can (and ought to be) grateful for our suffering if our suffering unites us more deeply to Christ. The culture we live in today rejects suffering as meaningless and is wrong to do so. The mystery of suffering is that from evil can come the most remarkable good, union with Christ, and when we experience that kind of union, we ought to be grateful for the condition that makes the union possible.
(3) While grateful for our suffering, we can never go looking for crosses that are not ours to carry; live the Christian life you are called to live, and you will find the suffering you are meant to experience; you don’t need anybody’s suffering in life but your own.
(4) We talk a lot in the world (and the Church) these days about healing wounds, but the important work of wound-healing cannot become an effort to live a life free from suffering. Sometimes your wounds will become the source of your deepest dependence on Christ, the way a man with a broken leg needs a crutch to get from one side of the room to another.
(5) While grateful for suffering as a cause of union with Christ, we can never resign ourselves to suffering—we must strive to fix what is missing, repair what is broken: get healthy, stop sinning, work toward freedom and justice for ourselves and others. We cannot become casually comfortable with suffering, using Christ as a reason to justify the experience of evil.
(6) Most importantly, the formula for union with Christ cannot work in us without perseverance: we need to hang in there and keep praying and loving and sacrificing no matter our experience of suffering. When St. Paul says that it is the power of Christ that dwells in him, the Greek word he uses literally means ‘should be tabernacling-over’—the grace of Christ given in the Eucharist overflowing into a life of prayer and loving and sacrificing—go ahead and call that a life of faith, hope, and charity.
Most of us could probably do a better job of living the formula for union with Christ that St. Paul identifies. Maybe we want to avoid suffering at all costs, never let ourselves get vulnerable, develop an intolerance for personal weakness, and never give Christ the chance to fill the dead spaces in our lives. Or maybe we make the opposite mistake of believing that suffering is good and go chasing after crosses that are not ours to carry or resign ourselves to suffering and stop trying to fix what is broken in us or in the world. Maybe we lack gratitude for the suffering we experience because we think it is pointless, meaningless, serves no purpose. And maybe we find suffering pointless and meaningless and purposeless because we lack perseverance: we make the tragic mistake of letting our suffering define us, rather than making us Christ-dependent, letting the grace of Christ fill those dead spaces causing us to live a life of overflowing faith and hope and charity.
To sum up: suffering is evil, evil is the absence of good, and those dead spaces in life become the place where Christ live in us, where the grace of Christ takes root in our lives. You ought not go chasing after suffering, but neither ought you to run from it. Become Christ-dependent in your suffering, and persevere always in the life of faith, hope, and charity. Maybe one day you will start boasting of your weaknesses like St. Paul because you will have discovered for yourself the great mystery that is union with Christ: when you are weak, then you are strong, because it is the power of Christ that dwells in you.
Homily preached on Sunday, July 7th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary