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“Jesus said, ‘Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you!’” (Luke 13:4-5)
“SOUL-SURFING” – March 7, 2010
Third Sunday of Lent
Luke 13:1-9
Fr. Robert deLeon, CSC
While suffering and death by the hand of human treachery is at least somewhat explicable, suffering and death by the seeming hand of God is not. Yet it’s always with us and always beyond comprehension. Televangelist Pat Robertson tried to make sense of January’s cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti when he suggested that the disaster was divine retribution for the Haitian people having made a pact with the devil centuries ago. And while religious leaders around the globe were quick to denounce both the man and his message, how many others of a more gentle theology likewise tried to make some sense of what, in the end, is mystery. Indeed, inexplicable suffering and death have always been part of the human condition. It just is. There’s no more to be said. Yet we never seem to give up trying. Consider an article written for a local newspaper by a mother about her attempt to make sense of this mystery for her children:
“I was sitting at the kitchen table one morning, when my 3-year-old decided to strike up a conversation about God and death. It's not the first time she's delved into the philosophical realm, so it didn't come as a complete surprise. But even with the previous warning and the experience of writing a book about helping children deal with grief, I still consider it a challenge to talk to my son and daughters about dying.
“After a series of classic preschool questions tinged with a touch of mysticism — whether God has toys at his house or a place to cook, whether He can fly or walk, whether He sleeps — my daughter turned to what was really on her mind: What does ‘heaven’ mean and who is going to die? I fought the urge to give her a brownie and hope she'd forget the whole thing. Instead, I dug in and answered everything she threw at me — on a 3-year-old level, of course — until she finally said, ‘I don't want to die. It's not coming yet, right?’
“The same thought runs through most of our minds when we stop long enough to think about death. We want to believe that it's not coming yet, but we know from looking at our families, our neighbors, our world that quite often it comes sooner than we hope and when we least expect it.
“Christian faith constantly reminds us to be ready, to live — as the country song says — like we are dying. Too often we ignore that clichéd concept until something makes us sit up and take notice. More often than not, that ‘something’ is suffering — be it our own or someone else's.
“None of us will be spared the cross. It will find its way to us in one form or another. In the midst of suffering, it can be difficult, maybe even impossible, to take comfort in the fact that the cross is not the end but the beginning. Yet if we can find a way to make that our focus, we just may find that we are no longer worried about whether our time is coming soon. Instead, our hearts will rest in the knowledge that when our time finally does arrive, we will, in the wise words of my young daughter, ‘go to find God,’ and all our questions will be answered.” (Excerpted from “Living in the Shadow of the Cross,” Mary DeTurris Poust, Albany, NY, Times-Union, March 28, 2009)
Suffering and death: always with us and always beyond comprehension. Yet we continue trying mightily to understand how a God we acknowledge as loving could allow such catastrophic events to happen to the people he purports to love. Today it’s Haiti; yesterday it was the Holocaust. As the big question — WHY? — hangs in the air, we brace ourselves for tomorrow.
While there remains no answer to the question, in the gospel passage we hear today, the crowds gathered to hear Jesus ask him about the tragedies of their own day, and his response is a rebuke to those who, like Pat Robertson, settle for facile answers. “Jesus said, ‘Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them — do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you!’” (Luke 13:4-5) And with that simple assertion, Jesus shouts across the ages that awful things happen both to the good and the bad, the young and the old, the rich and the poor. They just happen, that’s all. And if you want a more satisfactory reason, just consider suffering and death part of the package deal of humanity.
Reporting last year on the death of 93-year-old English Dominican Fr. Columba Ryan, the British Catholic weekly The Tablet provided a glimpse into the life of a man whose ministry sometimes took him into dangerous neighborhoods. Reports the periodical, “[Fr. Columba] was known for his sense of humor. When he went up to Glasgow to set up the Catholic chaplaincy to the University of Strathclyde, he moved into a semi-derelict tenement in George St. Outside his front door he put up a sign that read: ‘For Big Jim ring twice, for Big Charlie ring three times, for Columba ring once.’ Fr. Columba was the only resident.” (From The Tablet, August 22, 2009)
Indeed, while that sign was a humorous attempt to provide the priest a modicum of security in the high-crime neighborhood in which he chose to live, surely did he know he was not alone. Indeed, though he traveled his days in the uncertainty of seeing another sunrise, he was content in the knowledge that there really was a Big Jim or a Big Charlie ever with him and promising safe passage.