Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Infirmities create calamities. Diseases destroy and death comes. Unclean spirits cause fiendish afflictions. Even the slightest of fevers causes misery. Life is sheer drudgery, as Job declares. Our lives are no better than hireling, a slave imprisoned and chained. Misery dawns day after day, nothing seems to change. Days are short, rushed for time and nights drag, filled with worry, weary of the dawn. “All is vanity” as Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes (Eccl 1:1). Life is madness (Eccl 2:2). We, with Job, cry out at the hopelessness our lives face.
The proverb applies, our demons chase faster when we flee. Like an animal, our demons hunt us down. Yet, so many people flee, seeking to avoid drudgery. They want to escape. They flee, sinking deeper into addictions only to be enslaved. They fly off to new destinations only to realize their problems are in front of them, not behind. They develop new acquaintances only to realize what plagued their previous relationships infects the new one. They purchase products that promise vigor and vitality only to be disappointed and drained. Worst of all, people want a complete makeover. They want a different look: a new me! Surgery and steroids propose improvement because the life I live now is drudgery, misery, and slavery. Yet, the gamble rarely pays off. They merely changed the external not the internal. These acts are the cries of our heart, stricken with poverty, looking for hope.
Searching for meaning despite the drudgery and misery in our lives, hope dawns. Instead of fleeing, we embrace the drudgery within our heart. We face the drudgery, misery, and slavery. Doing so, dynamic opportunities penetrate our darkness. They touch our heart, inspire interior change in our lives, and set us free from the inside out.
The new opportunities do not change the reality, what changes is our heart. Drudgery activates a new energy. Slavery provokes visions of freedom. Misery motivates and prospects blossom. Not only can I survive, but I thrive because a Man comes into my life Who heals my woundedness, Who rebuilds my brokenness. He is Wisdom Incarnate, Jesus. He knows all things, including me. He offers his wisdom giving me counsel and courage. He changes my drudgery into hope, misery into redemption, slavery into salvation. He changes the meaning of my drudgery from oppressing me, to embracing me with Salvific Love.
St. John Paul II, a man of intense suffering, offers this Christo-centric understanding the paradox between love and suffering.
Suffering is present in the world in order to release love, in order to give birth to works of love towards neighbour, in order to transform the whole of human civilization into a "civilization of love." In this love the salvific meaning of suffering is completely accomplished and reaches its definitive dimension (John Paul II Salvifici Doloris # 30).
The definitive dimension of suffering is salvific love. The pains of our suffering drive us to heal, help, and offer hope out of love. Or as Jesus proclaims, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13).
Suffering creates compassion and those whose heart is not hardened by drudgery but filled with salvific love, reach out to lift those suffering from their wounded, broken lives. Suffering, if understood through the eyes of salvific love, that is a heart that empathizes and sympathizes with another’s misery, creates compassion. Seeing another suffer causes us to cry out compassionately for the one suffering. When we suffer, we cry out knowing we need compassion.
Compassion suffers with the other, not always to heal or take the suffering away, but to give comfort. Comfort strengthens the other, and, in that strength, an empowerment takes place. No longer downtrodden, another heart touches ours giving hope. This hope, as St. Paul explains, fills us with joy and peace despite the sufferings.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Rom 15:13).
The Holy Spirit transforms our drudgery into hope. No longer do we wallow in the misery of hopelessness but know there is meaning in suffering. It is salvific. Salvific love reaches into the depths of our pain, suffers with the afflicted, and then redeems both, the one who is suffering and the one showing compassion. Both embrace, experience, and endure the drudgery knowing suffering embraced strikes at the very of root of our drudgery and leads to the resurrection.
St. Paul understood this and explains the power of salvific love.
I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Php 3:10–11).
St. Peter was a man of many sufferings. He experienced his own drudgery and misery working all day catching nothing, repented of his doubt when he went out fishing again and caught so many fish the nets were breaking. He invited his friend Jesus into his home only to have his mother-in-law lay sick with fever. He confronted Jesus and was harshly corrected. “Get behind me Satan.” He said he was willing to die for his Master but denied him three times.
His rashness often humiliated him, yet he never tired of preaching the hope he received from Christ to those facing trials.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Pe 1:3).
Despite his self-inflicted wounds, Jesus calls Peter to follow Him. Jesus’ personal call touched Peter, healing him just as He touched and healed his mother-in-law. Jesus did not condemn Peter for his zeal to protect Him from his crucifixion. Rather he hoped his personal strength would protect Jesus. Yet, Peter could not contend with the enormity of evil that Jesus had to face. Peter, like us all, need the Counselor to correct our protests concerning suffering.
Drudgery, in any form, is a taste of evil. But by embracing our misery, a transformation takes place. Suffering, the isolation, abandonment, pain, and loss, no longer controls me, but Jesus’ love touches me. The drudgery we endure draws us into the heart of Jesus because Jesus’ mission was to seek out the lost and forsaken, the broken and the wounded. He enters our drudgery, experiences our misery, and by the power of his Holy Spirit consoles our souls, transforming our lives by suffering for us out of love. We, in turn, suffer with Him knowing with his love we “endure all things” (I Cor 13:7).