12th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jesus points out to his followers that they will get two sparrows for a penny in the market place. The penny was the smallest unit of currency. There are 16 pennies in a denarius, a day's wages for a labourer at the time of Jesus. So you could purchase an entire flock of sparrows for a day's wages! Yet the fall of even one sparrow is noted by our heavenly Father. Jesus tells his followers, 'You are worth more than hundreds of sparrows'. Jesus is saying here: God cares deeply for his creation and his creatures. 'Not one sparrow falls to the ground without your father knowing. . . so there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows' (Mt 10:29-31).
We are dealing here with what we call 'God's Providence'. We tend to assume that God's providence is essentially protective, similar to that of a father or mother who keeps a child from falling into the fire or running under a car! We feel too that God's providence should be discriminating, that God knows, or ought to know, the people who least deserve to suffer or who have already suffered enough. I think we feel too that God's providence should be responsive, that there should be a proportionate response from God to the prayers we've said or the sacrifices we've made for a particular intention.
Our experience of life is that God's providence is not always protective. For every story that appears to show his protectiveness at work, there's another to suggest indifference at best. For every person who escaped death on the road by a hair's breadth, there's another who didn't. The best of people often get the heaviest crosses, while the less deserving (in our eyes) suffer no misfortune at all. We're praying until 'we're blue in the face' with no tangible results.
That God answers our prayers in specific situations there can be no doubt. We know that, for one thing, by watching his Son at work. Prayer, and the prayer of petition as we call it, was central to the ministry of Jesus. Christ cured the centurion's servant, for instance, at the centurion's specific request. He was asked to do it and he did! He cured the daughter of the Canaanite woman, who knelt at his feet in faith. Time and again, he intervened to heal people and often linked his healing with their faith, but he didn't heal everybody, everywhere, so that the world became a disease-free zone. The forces of disease and death are still destructively at work. God's providence is not protective in the sense that it preserves us from all of these forces. Nor is it responsive to all our specific requests. If it were, we'd get everything for which we asked! But I'm certain that that would create its own problems.
So what does God's providence mean? What does Christ mean when he says that God, as our Father, is personally concerned about each one of us, that we're far more precious to him than the birds of the air or the lilies of the field? (Mt 6:25 ff.). It has to mean, I think, that Christ is talking about our best interests over time and eternity, about God's dealings with us in the overall! It has to mean that, if we suffer inordinately in this life, as Jesus did, there will be a 'balancing out' in the life to come. It has to mean that, in a world where disease and death are free to do their worst, there is a God there to comfort and eventually to reward. There is no simple formula by which we can define God's providence. The unevenness of human suffering is one of the greatest mysteries we have to face. For those at the uneven end, it is the most distressing mystery of all. What rankles with us most is not the pain so much as the perceived injustice. There are very few who can watch a loved one suffer without feeling angry and betrayed. What did I, or he, or she do to deserve this?
So what are we to do? We have to trust in life, in humanity, and in God. Trust is an essential ingredient in human experience. If we never trusted, we would never learn to cycle, to swim; our reflexes do not tell us that these are safe activities. On the contrary! Likewise, if we did not trust, we would never sit in an airplane. And it is not the pilot alone who has to be trusted. Our trust must extend to the fellow charged with pumping the wheel. In fact, if we hadn't some degree of trust, we would never get out of bed in the morning. So trust is really not an option. It is an essential ingredient to the living of life.
If our prayer is not answered and crosses come our way, we should pray, above everything else, for the grace of acceptance and the grace to cope! Suffering and death is part of life as we know it. If it were not so, we would not be who we are, the world would not be what it is. But we are who we are, the world is as it is; we must accept it and trust it. Suffering can break us or it can make us. We can sink under it or carry it, as Christ did to Calvary. Indeed, Jesus himself is the key to our dilemma. Despite his earlier assurances to others, in his final hours on the cross, he had his own agonising doubts about the constancy of divine providence: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mt 27:46). Yet in the depth of his agony and despite the 'vinegar' of his doubt, he surrendered himself in an act of total trust: 'Into your hands I commit my Spirit' (Lk 23 :46). It was a trust that was fully repaid on Easter morning. Please God there will be an Easter morning in our lives too, and the strong arm of God's comfort during the testing times in between!
(I am indebted to Joseph Cassidy's 'These Might Help...' (Veritas, Dublin, 2000, Pps. 239-240) for much of the above. )