Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Jb 7:1-4, 6-7
Second Reading: 1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23
Gospel Reading: Mk 1:29-39
Humans have “a hard service on earth,” said Job: “months of emptiness” and “nights of misery.” With COVID-19 many people feel the same. Will we ever return to “normal”?
(Actually, compared to life in the world throughout history, life in Canada before the virus was abnormal, with peace, freedom, prosperity, and security rather than war, tyranny, poverty, and uncertainty.)
God’s “very being is love,” for he “is an eternal exchange of love” among three persons, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “In a plan of sheer goodness,” he created us to share in that exchange: to live in the Trinity, loving and being loved, for all eternity.
This love is not just natural, “neither planned nor willed,” but somehow imposing itself on us, as Pope Benedict says. It is supernatural: freely willed. Accordingly, God created us with the freedom to love or not to love. In fact, man’s history is the “struggle” between “love and the refusal to love.”
God created our world to prompt us “to know him, love him, and serve him,” says The Penny Catechism, so that finally, we can say a definitive yes to his love, and so “be happy with him forever.”
Accordingly, “with infinite wisdom and goodness,” God “freely willed” to create the world not “complete,” but “in a state of journeying toward its ultimate perfection,” says the Catechism. “In God’s plan, this process involves … both constructive and destructive forces of nature.” Until the end, “physical evil” will exist in the world alongside “physical good.”
We might ask why, but we could never understand, for God’s answer would span all the history of the whole universe. God could only rebuke us as he did Job: “Who prescribes for [God] his conduct?”
Like Job, we would have to say, “I have dealt with great things that I do not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know.” God’s ways are as high above ours “as the heavens are above the earth.”
“I form the light, and create the darkness,” God says; “I make well-being and create woe: I, the Lord, do all these things.” And “Good and evil, life and death, poverty and riches, are from the Lord.”
With Job, we say, “We accept good things from God; and should we not accept evil?” With St. Paul, we thank God “always and for everything,” counting our present sufferings “as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us.”
We must never think that God must be excused for the world’s physical evil. No; unlike moral evil, it is part of his plan, freely willed.
We must never think that the “laws” of science constrain him. No; the universe “remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal,” says the Catechism. His care for everything, from electrons to history’s great events, is concrete and immediate.
In itself, suffering is evil. However, God deliberately makes it part of the way he reveals himself, saving, testing, teaching, disciplining, and healing us.
Like Jesus, we must work to alleviate suffering. Like him, we may also pray to avoid it: “Let this cup pass me by”; “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil.”
However, Christ accepted suffering willingly and made it the firm base of our salvation, defeating Satan, and reaching the roots of evil, sin, and death, said Pope St. John Paul II. Now our suffering completes his, as the Church completes his Mystical Body.
Paradoxically, suffering is good. The Church reveres it “with all the depth of her faith in the Redemption.” We should never waste it, but “offer it up” to Jesus “in union” with the Mass (even when we cannot attend), in “reparation” for sin (ours and the world’s), “and for the good of the whole Church,” as we say in our “Morning Offering.”
“If you knew the value of suffering, you would never give it up,” said Padre Pio.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English.” All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 21, “Death and the End of the World,” will be available Feb. 7.
