Homily for Fifth Sunday of Ordinary time
Jesus finds himself frequently among the suffering and the dying. He seems to have embraced those who suffered, just as he himself would fully embrace suffering and death at the end. As we see in today's gospel extract, the sick sought him out in great numbers. He was a source of hope and, ultimately, healing, for them.
The classic exploration of meaningless suffering and depression is of course the Book of Job. Anyone who has been through such an experience as Job will recognise the accuracy of his language and imagery: "Months of delusion assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, when will it be day; risen, I think, How slowly evening comes. Restless I fret till twilight falls." In fact, in the first centuries, when the Church was trying to decide what Jewish works should be included in the Catholic canon of Scriptures, a very strong case was made for the exclusion of Job. Job was though to be too pessimistic, too hopeless, too despairing. But another group took the view that this book faithfully recounted one aspect of our relationship with God. Depression and blackness, and a strong sense of God's absence, reflects the reality experienced by many, many people, at some stage in their lives at any rate. To ignore this aspect of human experience would be mere escapism or false optimism. This latter view prevailed and Job survived to continue his realistic if uncomfortable message. Because of the inclusion of the Book of Job in the Canon of scriptures, the bible becomes all things to all men and woman. It presents us with the full panorama of the human experience of God, from desolation to elation, from the despair of Job to the almost arrogant confidence of St. Paul. And the great treadmill upon which all were tested was suffering.
Suffering and death are central to our lives. All of us, to differing degrees perhaps, have been touched by the sufferings and pain of close friends or family members. Perhaps we have ourselves suffered and been changed in the process. Many of us will have experienced the harshest blow that live can give: the death of a loved one or a close friend. Understandably, we run scared from contemplating such experiences; we shrink from considering such possibilities. We will go to great lengths to avoid discussing them. As the Americans would put it, we go into denial in the face suffering and impending death. And this attitude is not confined to the personal dimension. Institutions and even nations can go into denial when confronted with unpleasant reality. Some of you may remember that, from the time he reached the age of 75 until his death, the Chinese dictator, Mao Tse Tung, was always photographed on his birthday swimming across the Yankzi river. But such a blatant denial of reality is not confined to some supposedly stupid communists. For over ten year the Vatican denied that Pope John Paul was a victim of Parkinson's disease. Only in the last month of his life did they liberate him to teach the most important lesson of his whole pontificate: he pointed out to the world the very necessary lesson that this condition, that this particular station was a natural landmark on the road to God. His minders, I fear, followed the ways of the world. They denied his illness; they strove to disguise his deterioration. An 80 year old man in a wheelchair was not, apparently, an acceptable image. Despite all that the man himself had taught and preached, at the end the cult of youthful vigour must prevail. His minders have fallen for the trap that he himself so often railed against. In doing so, they are following the mind-set of cosmetic surgery and superficial panacea: superficially, we have convinced ourselves that life is clinically manageable, that suffering and death have, at worst, been banished to the margins of old age. Yet we know in our hearts that illness, depression, pain and death are all very much part of life, that they are not confined to the domain of old age alone.
Since suffering and bereavement forces us to ask some very fundamental questions about our life, it naturally leads us to question our religion and our God. To put it bluntly, if someone close to you falls seriously ill or dies, your first question will be, "Where was my God when I wanted him?" "Where was he when we called upon him in our depression and desperation?" The Book of Job eats like a worm at the heart of the Old Testament. The book presents Job had been a wealthy man, highly regarded among his own tribe. He had a wife and family whom he greatly loved. Gradually, through sickness and famine, he loses everything that he held dear. He himself contracts leprosy and he is reduced to scavenging for scraps on the rubbish dump outside the city. Ensconced on the dump, he discusses his awful predicament with three friends who came to comfort him. "Why has God allowed this to happen to me?" Job asks in anger. His three comforters have an abundance of pious answers. But the glory of Job is that he rejects all these. The book closes with the problem unsolved. The book functions as a passionate demonstration that life and its complexity cannot be reduced to the personal predicament of one individual. Life is greater and more mysterious than any one of us.