We Should All Want to Die that Way
12th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Many people struggle with faith because of the reality of suffering. We get sick, or someone we love gets sick, or there are natural disasters that kill thousands of people, or there is the violence in the streets and the addiction and the poverty, or the horrors of war in another country, or just a terrible car accident on the highway, and we end up asking some form of the same question: why do bad things happen to good people?
A long time ago, most people believed that people deserved the suffering they experienced—there must have been some kind of sin or crime committed that caused the sickness or the violence or the natural disaster. But we no longer think that way. On average, we believe that no one deserves suffering. There is not a crime or a sin you can commit that merits cancer or a hurricane or a bad accident on the highway. No one deserves that kind of suffering, no matter what sins or crimes they have committed. Nor do we believe that sin or crime is the cause of suffering; bad things just happen to people, no matter the quality of anyone’s life.
We tend to respond to the reality of suffering with a demand for an answer: we want to know why. We will do a lot of reading, or praying, or begging, for an explanation of why something bad is happening. And the problem is that no answer we receive is ever good enough to explain away the reality of suffering. There is no rational account of evil that will take away the pain that comes from cancer or the sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one. Here is when some people start to struggle with faith: the absence of a satisfactory answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people causes doubt or anger or resentment, and sometimes a casualty of the doubt or anger or resentment is belief in God. You can only ask a question that never gets the answer you want for so long before you give up and stop asking—and that is the point at which many people lose faith.
But there are good answers to our difficult questions. The readings today actually give us two answers to the question of why bad things happen to good people. The first answer is the fact of creation, and the second answer is the fact of redemption. These are not the answers that we might want, but these are the answers that God gives us. Let me explain what I mean.
The story of Job gets into the deep cuts of human suffering and is pretty representative of what we experience in various ways in life. Job is a good man who experiences unimaginable suffering: for reasons that will never make sense to us, he loses his family, his home, his possessions; everything is taken from Job. For a good while, Job perseveres in the face of suffering and does not lose faith. The Lord gives, says Job, and the Lord takes away, so blessed by the name of the Lord. But then some friends show up and start pushing Job to demand better answers from God for his suffering. Job hangs in there for a while, but eventually he cracks, loses his composure, experiences doubt and anger, maybe some resentment, and demands an answer from God for why he has lost everything he ever loved.
We pick up the story at that point today. God speaks to Job from a storm and gives Job an answer, and that answer is the fact of creation:
Who shut within doors the sea,
when it burst forth from the womb;
when I made the clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling bands?
When I set limits for it
and fastened the bar of its door,
and said: Thus far shall you come but no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stilled!
We need to be careful about what is happening in the story. God is not saying: I am powerful, and you are weak, so do not question me. The answer that God gives to Job is more nuanced. God tells Job that he needs to ask a deeper question. The problem is that Job has settled for a lesser why: Job wants an answer to the question of why suffering exists, but the Lord tells Job to go deeper and ask the question why does life, the world, the universe exist? The problem is that Job has lost sight of the fact that life is a gift. From his pride, Job has become convinced that he deserves life and love, and that God is taking that away from him. But a gift is not a gift if you deserve it or earn it; no one deserves the gift of life, otherwise life would not be a gift at all; and no one deserves love the way we deserve a fair wage for a day’s labor, otherwise that would be real love. Life and love must be freely given, or life and love are not real—there is one answer to the reality of suffering.
St. Paul gives us a second answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people in our second reading, and that answer is the reality of redemption: Christ dies on a cross for the salvation of the world. Christ died for all, say Paul, so we no longer need to live life according to the flesh and we should regard one another as new creations in Christ because old things have passed away and new things have come. We experience the reality of suffering and—like Job—we settle for a lesser why: we want an answer to the question why does suffering exist, and lose sight of the deeper question of why does God suffer and die for us on a cross? Just like no one deserves the gift of life, no one deserves the gift of salvation; salvation is freely given, or it is not real. And there is God, up there on a cross dying for us, and what we see instead is the reality of our suffering.
Here is what I am trying to say: the fact of creation and the fact of redemption show us that God is love, and that is the real answer we get to the reality of suffering. Why is there cancer? God is love; he created the world because he is love. Why is there war and violence? God is love; he created you because he is love. Why poverty and addiction and natural disasters? God is love; he died on a cross for you because he is love.
The hard truth about the Christian life is that the fact that God is love will either be enough for you in your experience of suffering, or it won’t. There is no better answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people because the most important fact about any one person is the fact that they are loved by God. There is no way to rationalize or explain away or justify suffering; suffering is evil, it is not a part of the world God originally created, it is not what God wants for us. But we cannot allow the reality of suffering to blind us to the goodness of life, love, and salvation. Life is a gift, salvation is a gift, and no one deserves a gift, or the gift is not real.
Sometimes you meet a person dying in a hospital or a nursing home and they are simply overwhelmed with gratitude. How is that kind of gratitude possible backed up against the reality of death and the experience of suffering? Well, the first answer is: a lot of grace, which only amplifies the second, deeper answer—here is someone who knows (whether implicitly or explicitly) that God is love, that life is a gift, salvation is a gift, that life is good, no matter the reality of suffering. We should all want to die that way, hearts filled with gratitude for the gifts we have received.
The Lord gives—full stop. There is the fact, the answer, that matters most. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Homily preached on Sunday, July 23rd at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary