More Thoughts on Suffering
24th Sunday of the Year
I have a priest friend who received an anonymous letter in the mail the other day. He opened the letter to find a single newspaper clipping inside the envelope with the headline “Pope Francis on Homilies: Keep It Brief,” alongside a small note that said, “something for you to consider.”
I think that story is hysterical, but I also want to take a moment to thank each of you for not sending me a similar anonymous letter in the mail. We will need to see how I do with keeping things brief this morning.
The readings today talk about suffering, salvation, and discipleship, and I want to talk about these themes within the context of evangelization—or, perhaps better said, our struggle to evangelize the culture in which we live.
I want to begin by simply explaining the readings. The first reading from the Book of Isaiah is the 3rd of 4 suffering servant songs found in what scripture scholars consider the middle, second portion of Isaiah’s prophecy. These suffering servant songs were written during the generations that the Israelites spent in exile, in captivity, in Babylon. You can imagine the Israelites remembering past covenants with the Lord, experiencing the realities of exile and captivity, and asking hard questions about whether God has abandoned them. These suffering servant songs describe the sacrifice of a future messiah who will offer his life as a ransom that will purchase salvation for the people of Israel; these songs are a source of hope and consolation to those who are asking if God has forgotten them.
The first reading from the Book of Isaiah is given to us today because in the Gospel Christ talks about the reality of his own suffering and death. Christ is the messiah spoken of by the prophets, the messiah long foretold who will offer his life as a ransom for the salvation of not only Israel but for the salvation of the world. The single best answer to the questions about divine abandonment and the absence of God is the life of Christ—you are not abandoned, God is not absent, because Christ is given to you for your salvation. Christ is your salvation; Christ is your hope.
Talk about salvation and suffering leads Christ in the Gospel today to immediately begin a conversation about discipleship. His meaning is clear: your response to the life-giving ransom paid by the messiah must be a following of Christ that is marked by forms of imitation. Your desire for the salvation won by the messiah must lead to a life of imitative suffering for the sake of the Gospel: self-denial, cross-carrying, and following. The person who wants to save his or her life must lose it; if you want salvation, then you must follow Christ, and following means imitation, and imitation means suffering.
I talk a lot about suffering because suffering—what it is, why it is, what we do about it—is a constant theme in the scriptures. I think that there is a general distinction between two forms of suffering that we experience in life: there is natural suffering and there is supernatural suffering. Let me talk for a moment about each of these kinds of suffering.
Natural suffering is the kind of suffering that gets most of our attention today: serious illnesses, natural disasters, forms of political oppression, struggles with mental health, poverty, war and violence, the death of loved ones; you know the list. These forms of natural evil exist in the world because the world is broken by sin. The consequence is that our lives are marked by the suffering that is natural to a fallen world, a world that is not the world that God wanted but remains the world that God loves.
The reality of Christ is the response of God to natural suffering; no longer is death the end of life, and no longer do the sufferings of the present moment need to control us and define us. Salvation is possible because of Christ, but almost as important is the fact that your experience of natural suffering might now be meaningful, no longer must suffering remain pointless and wasteful. Your suffering makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability opens you up to the grace of Christ, and so your suffering becomes a way of uniting yourself now to the life of God. Here is the great mystery of suffering that St. Paul describes in his Second Letter to the Corinthians.
Supernatural suffering (as I am using the term) is different from natural suffering. Natural suffering is the consequence of a world broken by sin; supernatural suffering is the consequence of a world redeemed through Christ. Natural suffering is the default condition of human life; supernatural suffering is the default condition of those who make the choice to follow Christ. Natural suffering is a consequence of birth; supernatural suffering is a consequence of rebirth in the waters of baptism. The kind of supernatural suffering I am talking about is the suffering that you experience as an immediate consequence of discipleship.
The way I see life in the Church today, we do not do so well with the realities of supernatural suffering, suffering because of discipleship. Each time I hear someone talking about our government making choices that inhibit, harm or perhaps even persecute the Church, or hear someone complain that society is hostile to Christians, or learn that families or friends are becoming divided because some people follow Christ and others don’t, my immediate reaction is to remember that Christ tells us that these forms of suffering are a guaranteed cost of discipleship—so why ought we expect a different kind of life than the life of suffering because we follow Christ?
Here is my basic theory: on average, in the Church today, we have reduced the reality of supernatural suffering to acts of penance. Talk of self-denial and cross-carrying and following for most of us means fasting and personal discipline—sacrifices are small, the crosses of discipleship are small, but pursuing these forms of continual fasting and discipline become the best means for our achieving holiness in life.
I want to be clear that these forms of fasting and discipline are good and necessary, the kinds of tools that saints have used for centuries to work toward holiness in life, and for these reasons the Church proscribes acts of penance and fasting and self-discipline through law and teaching.
But I also do not believe that when Christ gives the final beatitude and tells his disciples that they will be blessed when others revile them, persecute them, and utter every kind of evil against them falsely because of their belief, he was really talking about abstaining from meat on Fridays or taking cold showers during Lent. Christ is not talking about the life of domesticated holiness in the beatitudes or in the Gospel today. He is talking about experiencing forms of supernatural suffering because your choice to follow Christ means that you are exposed and vulnerable to a world that rejects Christ and so also rejects you.
The fact of the matter is that we do not want to suffer—naturally or supernaturally. What we want is to enjoy a life of domestic security, stability, and comfort, free to manage the demands of work and family life as best we can, knowing that we can work toward salvation and holiness in life through small acts of penance and fasting and self-discipline. The government, the world, the people in our neighborhoods, anyone and everyone, ought to respect our wishes and at worst remain neutral about how we choose to live our lives, and at best ought to support our choices.
These are good desires and are images of what a restored kingdom of God might look like. But the kingdom of God is not yet realized: there is work to do, the work of evangelizing, the works of mercy and love, the real, authentic work of self-denial, cross-carrying, and following that is the cost of discipleship. The tension in our life comes from the fact that we want to live in the kingdom of God, but we want to do whatever building of the kingdom is needed at home, leaving the outside work to specialist and sub-contractors.
The point I want to make with my homily is that unless we are open to real suffering (supernatural suffering) as the cost of discipleship—being reviled, persecuted, attacked maliciously and falsely, the stuff of the beatitudes—the kingdom of God will not grow; there will be little evangelization, little growth for the Church. The failure of the Church to evangelize our culture in recent centuries makes sense to me, is not surprising, because that kind of work requires an openness to rejection and a vulnerability to the world that causes suffering—and no one wants to suffer when you do not need to suffer.
I am not telling you to go find a colosseum filled with lions and jump in while the ignorant people in the crowds mock your act of martyrdom. There is no cause for us to become dramatic or weighed down by falsely heroic thoughts of self-sacrifice; there are enough over-dramatic false heroes in the world today, and that would only be the working of pride in you.
But I am telling you that when Christ tells us in the Gospel today that the person who wants to save his or her life must lose it, the kind of losing he is talking about means more than acts of domesticated penance. He is talking about the final beatitude, the one we do not talk about much because we focus more on the peacemaking and the meekness and the mercy. But wanting salvation means following Christ, and following Christ means cross-carrying and self-denial, and your working for the kingdom means the reality of suffering—supernatural suffering; the person who wants to save his or her life must lose it.
Homily preached on Sunday, September 15th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary