God loves us too much to let us stop at finding happiness in chocolate

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Jb 38:1-4, 8-11
Second Reading: 2 Cor 5:14-17
 Gospel Reading: Mk 4:35-41

A man whose daughter was crippled by arthritis said, “I am no longer a devout churchgoer – not when God treats my daughter like this.” A woman whose husband died shortly after he retired said, “All he wanted was a little quiet golf. Was he asking too much?”

In this Sunday’s readings, God takes all Job’s possessions, kills his children, and afflicts him with boils. Job suffers it patiently, but reveals that he, too, had expected better from God.

As Christians, we learn that God loves us and desires our happiness. Accordingly, we proceed to tell him what will make us happy. In response, he says, gently, firmly, as he said to Job, “Don’t tell me what will make you happy; I made you!”

A woman overheard her young son telling a friend, “Imagine eating chocolates, one after the other. Well, heaven is better than that!” Those children must have long since outgrown their childish ideas of happiness; might we not outgrow our adult ideas as well?

God created us to enjoy him and wrote the desire for him into our hearts. We may overlook, forget, or reject him, through indifference, ignorance, fear, scandal, revolt against evil, or distraction by cares, riches, or irreligious currents of thought, but nothing less than God will satisfy us. “You have made us for yourself,” St. Augustine said, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Heaven is the ultimate fulfillment of our deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Bible uses many images to describe it, but, actually, “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him.”

We cannot comprehend the happiness of heaven, any more than a young child can comprehend the joys of marriage. Imagine trying to convince a child that, as an alternative to conjugal love, chocolates will lose all their appeal! “In that case,” he might say, “I don’t want to get married.”

Similarly, Christ says that in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and immediately our desire for heaven fades. How can he convince us that the joys of heaven will “swallow up” the pleasures of marriage? Like children, we prefer to stick to the joys we know.

However, God loves us too much to let us stop at chocolates. Out of love, he takes our chocolates away, if necessary, to help us look in the right direction: toward him. We should thank him, even through our tears, not reproach him or reject him.

Even when he does not take our chocolates away, he keeps reminding us that they will not satisfy us. We try the “perfect” spouse, the perfect job, and the perfect holiday, but they do not make us deeply, lastingly happy. How can they? They are only hints of the happiness we are made for: tantalizing glimpses, unfulfilled promises.

We must not delude ourselves that the answer is another spouse, a better job, or a different holiday. At the same time, we must not try to stifle our longings, for, on their deepest level, they are longings for God. If nothing on earth satisfies us, it is because we are made for something else.

Accordingly, we must never regard God’s gifts “from a human point of view,” St. Paul says. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away.”

Even death will no longer terrify us. “Why are you afraid?” Jesus asked his disciples. “Have you still no faith?”

With St. Paul, we will say, “To me, ‘life’ means Christ; hence dying is so much gain;” with St. Teresa of Avila, “I want to see God and, in order to see him, I must die;” and, with St. Therese of Lisieux, “I am not dying; I am entering life.”