The Lord is there in our suffering

Mgr William Shomali gives the Catholic Herald's Lenten reflections

5 March 2010

There is an insistent urgency in the Gospel passage of the third Sunday in Lent. Jesus's words are full of warning and alarm. Several times He repeats His severe admonition: "Unless you repent you will all perish!" Our Lord sees something wrong in our situation, and He strongly desires to save us from it. What is it that he is warning us about?

What is this repentance and conversion to which He so ardently calls us?

Perhaps we can understand by looking at what can happen to us when faced with the cross.

There was a man and woman, practising Catholics, who had three children. The last was a boy, a lot younger than his older siblings, and especially beloved by all in his family.

When he was eight years old he fell ill and died before his 10th birthday. In the years since, his parents have divorced. His mother, certain that God had not answered her prayers to save her son due to her own unworthiness and lack of faith, left the Church and joined a fundamentalist Protestant sect. His father reasoned that, if fate could take such a boy, then there is no good God and so shut himself up in a cynical atheism.

What happened to this good family may be repeated in our life in some way. When pain arrives, when tragedy strikes, it can make us lose our faith. This family focused on its unacceptable pain, which was not in the "bargain" they had made with God. Jesus wants us to change our false image of the Lord.

Proclaiming the Gospel over many years, I have realised how our views of God are distorted or partial. "What wrong have I done to deserve this?" "What a cross God has sent me!" Many times we hear these lamentations against God. Lent is an appropriate time for conversion, a favourable time to abandon the bad image of God we have and to rediscover the right one in the God of Jesus Christ.

Suffering is an extremely delicate and difficult topic and we all undergo crises when pain hits us.

We would like to have answers but God is almost silent. We have few pages in the Bible which inquire about the philosophy of suffering. When Job asked the Lord to give him a justification for his suffering, He avoided giving him a direct answer. He only hinted that suffering is not always the result of sin. Many sinners are happy in their life and many innocent people suffer tremendously.

Today's Gospel reading sheds more light on the subject. Jesus quotes two well-known events of his time, dismantling a widespread popular belief that continues to circulate today. An average man of that period thought that misfortunes, like the collapse of the tower of Siloam, punished people who, somehow, had committed a horrible sin. Illness and disability were viewed as an intervention of a frowning God who wanted to impose justice in the world and to take revenge on the wicked.

Why was a child born sick? The horrible but consistent answer was that the culprits were his parents. There was no pity for the sick, nor sympathy for the victims of the Romans' repression - they had been killed because of their sins.

If we followed the same logic as the people of that time, we would believe that the terror attacks in London were the retaliation of a cruel God because of the sins of the people who died or of their parents'. We would also say, unjustly, of the victims of the Gaza war or the Holocaust: "They paid for their personal sins."

Today we are no longer so harsh, but the substance of the argument does not change. Many people, in moments of pain and suffering, blame God for not doing His divine job well.

Instead, what Jesus says is surprising, shocking: life has its own logic, its own freedom. The collapse of the tower of Siloam can be attributed to the structure of the building being calculated wrongly, or to the greed of the workers who used substandard materials: the cruel action of Romans comes out of their policy of expansion that used violence as a means of oppression. In all these things, we cannot speak about a direct and timely intervention of God; in fact, things have their own autonomy and we can know their laws.

Jesus restores accountability: most of the pain that we suffer from is caused by others. God is innocent. He does what He can. But He is stopped in front of our stubbornness and hardness of heart.

So God is limited, then? No, but he leaves us free, because He wants us to be His sons and not His slaves. And Jesus concludes: we disciples are called to read these disastrous events as a reminder: we could have been under the tower when it collapsed. We might have been in London during the terrorist bombings on July 7 2005. We could have been inside or close to the Twin Towers during the September 11 attacks. We could have been in Haiti during the last earthquake.

Our life, friends, is tragically short. Let us take advantage of these days as days of salvation and conversion. We cannot wait, neither can we postpone it.

Today, the Lord passes by and saves us. Today we are called to make good use of our freedom and go to see the great miracle of the burning bush, of a God who knows our name and our situation.

Conversion, then, is to turn to Him, present among us, tangible in the Sacrament of the Church and in the Gospel. And in turning to Him and sharing our life with Him, we begin to see the world "through Him, with Him, and in Him" - as we sing at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer. In this way our hearts are no longer filled with the terror of what might come, but with the expectation of seeing how, through Him, with Him, and in Him, all things lead to everlasting communion. The last word is not our failures or loss but rather His victory. His death on the Cross did not mean His separation from His mother or His apostles, but the path to true closeness to them forever.

Are we asking for the Lord of hope to come into our lives, into our pain, into our death and turn all of it into a path of love, mercy and everlasting life? Or are we just trying to protect ourselves form the pain, protect ourselves from reality, protect ourselves from God?

Mgr William Shomali is the chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem