Jesus has a secret
12th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A): Lectionary 94
Jesus has a secret.
He has a secret he is whispering in the darkness, and wants us to shout from the rooftops when the light returns – The Father knows us, watches over us, and values us. God knows us, loves us, watches over us and values us.
So what does our enemy, the father of lies, want us to fear, believe and feel? That we are ignored, unloved, forgotten, and worthless.
- God is love. God loves us better than the best mother or father.
- So our enemy wants us to feel unloved, so that we doubt God’s love, and he works to destroy our image of fatherhood itself to further that doubt.
- Our God tests us, probing our minds and hearts, allowing us to learn that God is trustworthy, even when we do not see the love and power of God working in dark moments.
- So our enemy wants us to feel forgotten and ignored if, in a dark moment, we cannot see the love and power of God working.
- Our God reminds us that Jesus was rejected and betrayed, and yet remained faithful and poured out compassion.
- So our enemy encourages us to respond to rejection and betrayal by becoming hardened, and rejecting and betraying others.
- Our God wants us to lean on faith, hope, and love in times of distress. God wants us to know that we are safe and loved.
- So our enemy tempts us to follow our heart, to follow our feelings when they lead us into the pit, even though we know that our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked, and that hearts must be led, not followed.
St Jerome says (Commentary on Mt 10:29-31): “If little birds, which are so little value, still come under the providence and care of God, how is it that you, who given the nature of your soul are immortal, can fear that you are not looked after carefully by him whom you respect as your Father?”
It is ridiculous, actually. Ludicrous, even, how often we forget this and fall into loneliness, pessimism and despair!
We hear the whisperings of our enemy, and yet we forget the whisper of God – the still, small voice of God saying: fear not, you are loved. We fix our eyes on suffering, and forget the goodness of God.
Father Jacob Powell addresses this in his latest book, The Saving Power of Suffering: “In the time of the great Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites wandered for forty years in the desert because of their terrible sins against God. During this journey they began complaining once again about their hardships. Regardless of the numerous ways God supernaturally aided them through plagues against the Egyptians, the splitting of the Red Sea, the manna sent in the desert… they continued to see only their immediate difficulties and not the larger picture, the providence of God and his consistent care for them.”
We are no better and no different. We continue to see only our immediate difficulties, and we do not see the bigger picture, which is dominated by the providence of God and God’s consistent care for us.
Difficulties, and suffering are intended to expand our hearts – to increase our ability to love. So, of course, our enemy tries to use suffering to plant doubts, and to shrink our hearts, until they are at least three sizes too small.
Jesus promises that in this life, we will have trouble. Often, we suffer for our own sins and mistakes, and for those of others that directly affect us. Sometimes we suffer unjustly, for righteousness sake, or simply because we live in a fallen world.
Sometimes we suffer through no fault of our own, because no sin is private – every sin affects the entire body of Christ, the Church, and not just the Church, but indeed the whole world. We suffer as the consequence of sin in the world, and we cause suffering as a consequence of our sin.
We also experience suffering as a consequence of our own sins and mistakes. This suffering is intended to cause us to recognize God’s wisdom and goodness, so that we will choose more wisely in the future.
No matter the cause, all suffering is intended to expand our hearts – to increase our ability to love, and to transform us into a conduit of grace.
As Christians, we are, literally, “little Christs” – we are the body of Christ, identified with and as Christ in the world. What did Christ do with his suffering, his passion, and his death? He transformed them into a remedy for sin. He transformed his suffering into a conduit of endless mercy and inexhaustible compassion.
God desires we do the same.
We do so by uniting our sufferings with the cross of Christ. “His death is certainly the only reason salvation is possible, but His merits on the Cross are also the graces poured out on to individual souls for conversion and sanctification. Therefore, the soul who lovingly endures hardships and offers them in unity with the sufferings of Christ also merits grace for the sake of others.” (Fr. Jacob) There is power in our suffering when we offer it for the atonement of sins or for the conversion of others. Many great saints even seek out suffering, so that they can offer it up for sins and for the salvation of sinners.
All this is to say that God’s grace will make even the suffering we experience a source of further grace. His mother and his beloved disciple have a place at the foot of his cross, where they can unite their sufferings with his. We are his beloved disciple, his mother, and his brother, and he has given us that same privilege.
In this life we will have suffering; praise God, because even this is a path to grace and life and joy. May this be our attitude in all things. “The LORD gives, and the LORD takes away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
May we have the spirit of a child who is convinced of her father’s love, and, who will, as Pope Francis says, “turn to and ask him with confidence [because] our needs, from the most evident, daily ones such as food, health, and work, to those of forgiveness and support against temptations” do not mean that we are left alone. Instead, they remind us to call upon “a Father who always looks at us with love, and who certainly does not abandon us.”
