"DO NOT CONFORM YOURSELVES TO THIS AGE."

Homily for August 27th, 2017: 21^st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. 
          Rom. 11:33-36; Mt.16:13-20.

AIM:  To help the hearers encounter God in the mystery of suffering.

 

Thirty-nine years ago, on August 26, 1978, a little known Italian bishop and cardinal, Albino Luciani, was elected Bishop of Rome. He took the name, John Paul I, becoming, according to Catholic belief, the successor of the fisherman Simon, to whom Jesus in today=s gospel gave the name APeter C the Rock.@

In reality, Peter was anything but rock-like. On the contrary, he was impulsive: quick to make great resolutions, but just as quick to abandon them under pressure. The rock on which Jesus built his Church was certainly not Peter=s strength of character or willpower. The Church=s foundation is Peter=s faith: his trust in God and in the One whom he calls in today=s gospel: ASon of the living God.@

Peter had to learn this trusting faith from mistrust of himself. Every one of Peter=s successors, our present Holy Father included, carries the heavy burden of Church leadership in this same spirit: mistrusting himself, trusting solely in God and in his divine Son Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict stated this explicitly in his first public appearance on the day of his election: AAfter our great Pope, John Paul II the cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in God=s vineyard. I am consoled by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and how to act, even with insufficient tools, and I especially trust in your prayers.@ Pope Benedict said the same in different words in April, at the end of the Mass he celebrated in April 2008 in New York=s St. Patrick=s Cathedral. Responding to the tribute paid to him on the third anniversary of his election he said: AAt this moment I can only thank you for your love of the Church and Our Lord, and for the love which you show to the poor Successor of Saint Peter. I will try to do all that is possible to be a worthy successor of the great Apostle, who also was a man with faults and sins, but remained in the end the rock for the Church. And so I too, with all my spiritual poverty, can be for this time, in virtue of the Lord=s grace, the Successor of Peter.@

The man who became Peter=s successor thirty-nine years ago exercised his office for only thirty-three days. Early in the morning of September 29, 1978, Catholics the world over were shocked to learn that during the preceding night the man we had already grown to love as Athe smiling Pope@ had gone home to God.

Catholics the world over asked: Why? At the Pope=s funeral the cardinal who preached made no attempt to answer that question. Instead he cited the words we heard in our second reading: AOh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!@

We cannot scrutinize God. We cannot analyze him. As we read in the prophet Isaiah: AMy thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.@ (Is. 55:8f)

How important it is for us to remember those words in our scientific, technological world. We are comfortable today with things we can count, measure, weigh, observe under a microscope, or analyze with a computer. God cannot be measured. He cannot be observed, analyzed, calculated. God is not like a computer.  God is the utterly other. He does not act predictably, automatically. God acts in sovereign freedom C and in love so strong, so passionate, that the greatest human love is like a child=s infatuation by comparison.    

All across this land there are families with a loved one serving overseas in the military. They share a common fear: a ring or a knock on the door announcing the visit of two figures in military uniform, one of them a chaplain, to tell them that a husband, a father, a son, or a brother has fallen in the service of his country. And now that the feminists have succeeded in getting women sent into combat, it may also be a wife, a mother, a daughter, or a sister. In the agony of such sudden and tragic bereavement, there is no one who does not ask, Why? Why him? Why her?

Perhaps there is someone here today who is asking that question. Maybe it is a grave illness: your own or that of a loved one. For someone else the blow may be the death of a relationship. A marriage, or a wonderful friendship, which once filled you with joy, hope, and love is turning to indifference, sullen resentment, or even hatred. For yet another the blow may be the collapse of great hopes and dreams. 

All of us have received such hard and bitter blows. I received such a blow when I was only six. It was the day after Christmas, 1934. My father came home from the hospital, to which my mother had been taken with pneumonia just a week before, and spoke the three most terrible words I have ever heard: AMummy is dead.@ That was almost eighty-three years ago. I still ask, Why? 

Does our Christian faith answer this agonized question? I must be honest and tell you: it does not. To try to give someone who is suffering bereavement, injustice, or illness reasons why it is all for their own good C why it all makes sense if only they will be reasonable and think about it C is an insult. It is especially insulting when such easy answers are clothed in religious language C as if God were somehow responsible for sickness, suffering, injustice, and death. Such seemingly religious answers insult those who are suffering. They also insult God.  God is not responsible for suffering, for sickness, for injustice. God does not kill people. People kill people. So do deadly diseases. Why those things happen is a mystery C a dark mystery.

I cannot tell you just when I discovered God in the darkness that descended on me at my mother=s death. But I know it was by age eight at the latest. It came home to me one day with blinding certainty that I would see my dear mother again, when God called me home. From that day to this the spiritual world of God, of the angels, the saints, and our beloved dead has been real to me. I know people who are there: my mother first, and now so many others who have gone home to God. 

Decades later I realized, looking back, that that childhood insight was the seed from which my call to priesthood grew. It planted in me the desire to be close to that spiritual world. At Mass I have the privilege, far beyond any man=s deserving, of leading you, the holy people of God, to the threshold of that world.  Heaven comes down to earth, and earth is lifted up to heaven as we praise our inscrutable yet passionately loving God with the angels= song: Holy, Holy, Holy; heaven and earth are filled with your glory. Amen.