24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Is 50:5-9
Second Reading: Jas 2:14-18
Gospel Reading: Mk 8:27-35
To follow Jesus, we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses, as he did. Those who try to save their lives will lose them; those who lose their lives for his sake will save them.
This paradox runs all through Jesus’ teaching. If we are poor, sad, persecuted, insulted, or slandered, the world calls us unfortunate; if we are meek, merciful, or peaceable, the world calls us weak, timid, or lazy; if we are hungry for righteousness or single-hearted in our devotion to God, the world calls us unrealistic and impractical.
But Jesus said we should consider ourselves blest. As soon as we see things “in the right perspective” – “in terms of God’s values” – “the standards of the world are turned upside down,” said Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
We see a similar paradox when we ask the question at the beginning of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: If God cares for us, “why do evil and suffering exist?” The short answer – which takes the whole of the Catholic faith to explain it – is, because love exists.
God made us “to know him, love him, and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.” Love is what he made us for. “At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons” of the Holy Trinity.
Now love is communion between free and distinct persons. Paradoxically, therefore, but logically, it necessarily involves suffering.
To see why, realize that for two humans to enter into any kind of communion, we must inhabit the same material world and each know how to manipulate it. For example, for us to talk to each other, we must both know how to set up sound waves in the air between us.
Accordingly, the material world must be predictable; it must have a fixed nature. And if it does, it cannot always please us both. For example, if you sit where you want, I may not be able to sit where I want.
Whether small or great, such “suffering” is unavoidable in any communion of persons. However, paradoxically – because we were made for love and communion – it delights us. Lovers positively enjoy giving up their own wishes for the sake of the beloved.
“We must think of love as suffering,” said Pope Benedict. To say yes to love is to risk suffering, for “love means being dependent on something that perhaps can be taken away from me.”_
In love, “I cannot simply remain myself; I always have to lose myself” – to have “my rough edges taken off,” to allow myself to be “hurt.”
“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken,” says C.S. Lewis. If you want to keep it intact, “lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.” There it “will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable” – a condition Jesus called hardness of heart. “The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.”
Love, by its nature, runs counter to self-seeking, for it is an exodus out of myself. It means losing myself; but also, paradoxically, finding myself. Love “brings man to himself and makes him what he should be,” Pope Benedict says.
By his suffering, Jesus redeemed us and our suffering, giving it supernatural value. We should never waste it, then, but always “offer it up” to him “in union” with the Mass, in “reparation” for sin, “and for the good of the whole Church.”
Suffering is something to accept, if not actually welcome, said Pope St. John Paul II. In fact, “it is something good, before which the Church bows down in reverence with all the depth of her faith in the Redemption.”
Father Hawkswell's course “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” will begin again online in YouTube form Sept. 19 free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course.