"ARISE,MY LOVER, AND COME."

Homily for December 21^st, 2019: Song of Songs 2:8-14.         

       “Hark, my lover – here he comes springing across mountains, leaping across hills … My lover speaks, he says to me, ‘Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come!’”

        These words from our first reading come from a short book called The Song of Songs. It is a collection of love poems portraying, in the form of an allegory, the love between the soul and God. In the passage we have just heard the human lover calls out to God, the Beloved. Christians have always understood the Beloved to be a figure for Jesus – which is why the Church gives us the passage, just four days before Christmas. The one calling out, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come,” is Jesus. His love for us is passionate. He longs for us to be close to him always.

        One of the great interpreters of this book is the twelfth century French monk, St. Bernard. He begins his commentary on the Song of Songs with the book’s opening words, addressed by the soul to God: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The kiss, Bernard explains, is the Holy Spirit, who binds Father and Son together in love. The kiss may also be understood, however, as Jesus Christ, who with his kiss unites divinity and humanity. Since we are sinners, we cannot raise ourselves all at once to the Lord’s mouth. We must first fall at his feet, kissing them in repentance. Then, as the Lord’s stretches out to grasp and steady us as we rise, we kiss his hands. “And finally,” Bernard says, “when we shall have obtained these favors through many prayers and tears, we humbly dare to raise our mouth to his mouth .... not merely to gaze upon it but – I say this with fear and trembling – to receive his kiss. ... And whoever is joined to him in a holy kiss becomes, at his good pleasure, one spirit with him.” 

                We don’t read the Bible like that today. Some people still do, however. Let me tell you about one of them, a Jewish psychiatrist before he was baptized at age 27 and became a Trappist monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey in western Massachusetts, where he died in November 2006 at the age of 97. A true son of St. Bernard, Fr. Raphael Simon (his monastic name), left us these beautiful lines:

  “To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances.

             To seek him, the greatest human adventure.

                To find him, the highest human achievement.”                              

THREE CHRISTMAS HOMILIES

NO ROOM IN THE INN.

Christmas Midnight.  Luke 2:1-14.

AIM: To help the hearers make room for Jesus Christ.

 

We have less hard information about Jesus’ birth than most people suppose. We don’t even know the date: December 25^th was not selected until the fourth century. Nor do we know exactly where Mary gave birth to her child, save that it was not in what then passed for an inn at Bethlehem.

The innkeeper was a busy man in those days. The roads were full of travelers, because of the Roman-imposed census, which required people to return to their native town to be placed on the tax rolls. There was much to do at the inn, and money to be made. According to the age-old law of supply and demand, guests were doubled up, and prices raised. When Mary and Joseph appeared at his door, the innkeeper saw at once that these humble travelers were not the kind of guests he was looking for. He might have said, “You can’t afford it.” Instead he told them, a bit more tactfully, “No room” -- and slammed the door. The innkeeper never knew it. But with those two words, “No room,” he had missed out on the greatest opportunity life would ever offer him.

It would be unfair to portray the Bethlehem innkeeper as a bad person. His words to Mary and Joseph, “No room,” would be repeated often in the next three decades. For the world to which Jesus came had in truth no room for him, though it was his world. As we shall hear tomorrow, in our third Christmas gospel: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him” (Jn. 1:11).

The ancient world into which Jesus was born had in Rome a temple called the Pantheon, with room for a hundred gods. But for the Son of the one true God there was no room in Rome’s Pantheon. Nor was there room for him in his own country -- until people finally found room for him: on a hill called Calvary. 

Has the situation changed in two thousand years? Would there be room for Jesus Christ if he were to come to the world today? to our town? A person would have to be bold indeed to be confident of an affirmative answer to that question. Down through the centuries, and still today, the innkeeper’s words resound: “No room, no room.” And doors are slammed at his approach.

Why is there no room for Jesus Christ? Because people are afraid -- afraid that if they give him room, he will take too much room; that little by little this man will take over their lives, changing their interests, their priorities, their plans, until they are no longer recognizable. 

Is this fear justified? It is. If we admit Jesus Christ, he will indeed change our lives, and us. He will take all the room there is. No wonder that people are afraid. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” we read in the letter to the Hebrews (10:31).

There is, however, something even more fearful. It is this: to try to shut out this guest. For unlike other travelers, Jesus will not go away. He will continue to knock on our door, no matter how often we tell him, “No room.” The hand with which he knocks bears the print of the nails which pierced him in the place where, finally, people did find room for him. His persistence, like his patience and his love, are more than super-human. They are divine. He is the personification of the love that will never let us go.

Today, in this hour, Jesus Christ is asking for room in your life. He asks one thing, and one thing alone: that you open the door. 

 

Some verses of an old hymn, little known to Catholics, say it best.

 

O Jesus, you are standing, outside the fast-closed door,

In lowly patience waiting, to pass the threshold o'er.

Shame on us, Christian people, his name and sign who bear,

Shame, thrice shame upon us, to keep him standing there.

 

O Jesus, you are knocking, and lo, that hand is scarred,

And thorns your brow encircle, and tears your face have marred.

O love that passes knowledge, so patiently to wait.

O sin that has no equal, so fast to bar the gate!

O Jesus, you are pleading, in accents meek and low,

"I died for you, my children, and will you treat me so?"

O Lord, with shame and sorrow, we open now the door;

Dear Savior enter, enter, and leave us nevermore.  

____________________________________________

 

WHAT THE SHEPHERDS FOUND.

Christmas, at Dawn. Titus 3:4-7; Lk 2:15-20.

AIM: To instill a sense of wonder and joy at the incarnation.  

The world’s great religions, someone has said, are all about the same thing: our search for God. To this general statement there is an important exception. Christianity, and its parent, Judaism, are concerned not with our search for God, but with God’s search for us. At Christmas we celebrate God’s search, and his coming to us, in a special way. The readings at this Mass give us answers to three important questions about God’s coming. They tell us how God comes, when he comes, and why.

How does God come?

He comes in very ordinary and humble circumstances, to very ordinary and humble people. There was nothing dramatic about the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem. Few people took any notice -- only a few outsiders, and three crackpot eccentrics “from the East.”.

Shepherds were outsiders in the ancient world. Without fixed abode, like gypsies today, they were mistrusted by respectable people. Since they frequently grazed their flocks on other people’s land, shepherds were considered too dishonest to be witnesses in court. Because their irregular lives made it impossible for them to observe the strict Sabbath and dietary laws, observant Jews held them in disdain.     

The so-called Wise Men, whose visit we commemorate at Epiphany, were eccentrics: astrologers of some kind from God knows where, who set off on a madcap journey, following a star. We call them wise. To their contemporaries they were screwballs who were not playing with a full deck.

Nor was the scene which these visitors found at Bethlehem as attractive as we make it appear in our Christmas cribs. If Jesus were born today, it would probably be in a cardboard shack with a roof of corrugated iron in Africa, or somewhere in Latin America, without electricity or water: smelly, drafty, and cold.

How does God come? He comes in ordinary and humble surroundings, to people who live on the margin of society. That is how God came on the first Christmas. It is how he comes today.

When does God come?

He comes when we least expect him -- when people have given up expecting him altogether. Matthew and Luke emphasize Jesus’ descent from the great King David, and Jesus’ birth “in David’s city” (Mt 1:17; Lk 1:27, 2: 4 & 11). They wanted to show that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, whose birth “of the house of David” the prophets had long foretold.

Almost six centuries before Jesus’ birth, however, David’s royal house had come to an end. The revival of his long extinct dynasty after so great an interval was, humanly speaking, impossible. Moreover, the imperial census, which brought Joseph and Mary to David’s city, Bethlehem, was a humiliating reminder to their people that the nation over which David had once ruled as king was now governed by a foreign emperor across the sea. Rome, not Jerusalem, was the center of the world into which Jesus was born. At the very moment in which that world was set in motion by an imperial decree from its center, God was acting in an unimportant village on the edge of the empire in an obscure event from which we continue, twenty centuries later, to number our years.

Unthinkable? Impossible? Precisely! That is how God normally acts. He comes to us when we are least expecting him; when we have ceased expecting him at all. He comes in ways that stagger the imagination and demolish our conception of the possible. The creator of the universe comes as a tiny baby, born of a virgin. 

Why does he do it? Why does God come at all?

To these questions our second reading gives us the answer: “When the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, [he saved us] not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.” 

God’s coming is not a reward for services rendered. He chose to come to us at the first Christmas for the same reason he comes to us today: not because we are good enough, but because he is so good, and so loving, that he wants to share his love with us, his unworthy, erring, and sinful children.

This explains too why he chose outsiders and eccentrics as the first witnesses of his coming. Before him we are all outsiders, all eccentrics. Before God we are all marginal, as the shepherds were, and the wise men. It is His love, and His alone, which draws us in from the darkness and cold of the margin to the light and warmth of the center.

It is because God gave us his love at the first Christmas that we give gifts to one another at this season. The love God gave us then, and continues to give us today, is neither distant, nor abstract. God’s love is a person who is very close to us. His name is Jesus Christ.

___________________________________________________________

 

“THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH.”

Christmas Mass during the day.  Heb. 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18.

AIM: To explain the Incarnation and its significance for us.

It’s a strange gospel for Christmas, isn’t it? Where, we ask, are the shepherds, the manger, Mary and Joseph? Where is their child? Instead of these familiar Christmas figures we have heard about abstractions: light and darkness, the Word becoming flesh.

Let’s start with another word: “incarnation.”  It means “taking on flesh, embodiment.” This building is the incarnation of an idea in the mind of the architect who designed it. It is the incarnation or embodiment too of the sacrifices that made its construction possible. Children are the incarnation of their parents’ love. And Jesus is the incarnation of God. 

We cannot see God. Jesus shows us what God is like. That is why this Christmas gospel calls Jesus God’s Word. A word is used to communicate. Jesus is God’s word because he is God’s communication to us: not a lifeless, abstract statement, but God’s living and breathing utterance and self-disclosure.    

When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people. They were the ones who welcomed him most warmly. The rich and powerful and learned had difficulties with Jesus. Many were hostile to him. That was true then. It remains true today.

Jesus was of the earth, earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter’s shop. His teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the thief breaking in at night. Those were images that everyone could understand. Jesus taught also in parables: stories so simple that they capture the interest of children; yet so profound that learned scholars are still studying them today.

In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God’s utterance and word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying through all the circumstances of his life that God loves humble people. God is especially close to those who feel that they are not in control of their lives; that they are the victims of circumstances; that their lives are a tangle of loose ends and broken resolutions.

In his earthiness Jesus shows us God’s love for this world and everything in it.  Often we think of God and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. That is wrong! God loves the earth and the things of earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything that is not lovable. As John, the writer of today’s gospel, tells us in a later chapter: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16).

It is because God gave us his Son at Christmas that we give gifts to one another. The greatest gift we can give cannot be bought in any store. You cannot order it from an 800-number or over the Internet. You cannot wrap it. You cannot send it through the mail, by UPS or Federal Express. It is the gift God gave us at Christmas: the gift of himself. Even as a baby Jesus is God’s personal word and communication to us. In the words of our second reading, he is “the refulgence [that means the shining forth] of [God’s] glory, the very imprint of his being.”

Look at Mary’s child: helpless, vulnerable, and weak, as all babies are. He is God’s way of saying: ‘This is how much the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, loves you; enough to be become tiny, insignificant, vulnerable.’ Jesus, the personal utterance and word of God, is God’s gift to you. He wants you to share this gift with others. You do so when, like God himself, you give yourself to others: when, like Jesus, you too love the company of ordinary people; when, like him, you remain close to the earth and the things of earth.

In a few moments we shall be offered our greatest and most important Christmas gift: the body and blood of our Lord, of Jesus who is God’s personal communication and word to each one of us. The consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist are Christ’s body and blood: all his power, all his goodness, all his love. He offers all this to us:

--       not as a reward for services rendered;

--       not because we are good enough (for none of us is);

--       but because he is so good that he wants to share his power, his goodness, and his love with us.

Jesus gives us this greatest of all gifts under one strict condition: that what we here receive, we generously share with others.      

A VOICE FOR THE WORD.

Homily for December 19^th, 2019: Judges 13:2-7, 24-25a; Luke 1:5-15.

          When the angel Gabriel visited the young Jewish teenager, Mary, to tell her that God wanted her to be the mother of his Son, Mary asked, quite naturally, how such a thing could be possible. To which the angel responded: “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

          Both of our readings today show God doing the impossible. In today’s first reading, the recipient of a gift impossible for anyone but God is identified simply as “the wife of Manoah.” The Bible nowhere gives her name. She is unable to conceive a child. Numerous contemporary articles and books by unfruitful wives testify eloquently to the grief experienced by women whose dreams of motherhood remain unfulfilled.  Manoah’s wife is visited by an angel who tells her that she will have a son who will free his people from their enemies.

          The woman in today’s gospel reading is named: Elizabeth, wife of the Jewish priest Zechariah. Both are far beyond childbearing age. This time the angel bringing the news that she will conceive and bear a son appears not to Elizabeth but to her husband. Zechariah is unable to believe that such a thing is possible. In consequence, the angel tells him, he will lose the power of speech until the promised boy is born. 

          In one of his sermons (293:1-3) St. Augustine uses a play on the two Latin words vox (voice) and verbum (word) to explain the reason for this. Zechariah’s son, John the Baptist, was called, Augustine says, to be a voice: vox – for the word, verbum: Jesus, God’s personal utterance and communication to us. While still in his mother’s womb, John’s voice was silent. Only when John, the voice for the Word, was born, was his father’s power of speech restored.

In a different but similar way, we too are called to be voices for God’s Son, the Word: at least by the witness of our lives. St. Francis of Assisi has said it best: 

“Preach always. If necessary, use words.”

"JOSEPH DECIDED TO DIVORCE HER QUIETLY."

Homily for December 18^th, 2019: Matthew 1:18-25.

Luke’s gospel tells us that when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to tell her that God wanted her to be the mother of God’s son, Gabriel also told her that Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, though far beyond child-bearing age, was also, as they say in England, “in a family way” – six months pregnant, in fact. With typical generosity, Mary decides to go and visit Elizabeth. She couldn’t start right away. It was a man’s world. A woman, especially a young teenager like Mary, could not travel alone. She must have at least one chaperone.

Organizing that took time. Since the whole purpose of the visit was to help with the birth of Elizabeth’s son, Mary was away from home for some months. By the time she got back to Nazareth, she was visibly pregnant. A film I saw a few years ago – I think it was called The Birth of the Messiah – shows Mary’s encounter with Joseph after her months’ long absence. The look on his face is unforgettable.

          According to the law of that day, an unmarried woman who got pregnant could be stoned for bringing shame on her family. Though Mary had been unfaithful to him, Joseph still loved her and did not want to be responsible for her death. Rather than bringing public charges, Joseph decided simply to break off the engagement quietly.

Then something unexpected happens. An angel visits Joseph and tells him: the baby growing in Mary’s womb has no human father. He is God’s Son, the anointed Servant of the Lord, the Messiah, whose coming Israel’s prophets have predicted for centuries. Then Joseph wakes up and realizes it was only a dream.

Or was it really a dream, Joseph wonders? Suppose it’s true? With great courage, and almost super-human faith, Joseph decides to go ahead with his longed planned marriage. For the rest of his life, whenever Joseph had doubts or second thoughts about the life he had chosen, all he had to go on was the memory of a dream when he was only a teenager.

          Friends, we too have staked our lives on a dream: that God exists; that he is a God of love and of justice; that he has called us, as he called Joseph, to be special servants for Mary and her Son Jesus.

                                                                                                      

FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT

EMMANUEL -- GOD WITH US

Dec. 22^nd, 2019: Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year A - Mt. 1:18-24.

AIM: To help the hearers recognize God's presence in their lives today.

 

A Sunday school teacher told a class of young children the Christmas story of the shepherds and the Wise Men. At the end she asked them: “Who do you think was the first to know about the birth of Jesus?”

A girl’s hand shot up: “Mary,” she answered.    

Well, sure. How could anyone miss that? That’s just the kind of thing, however, that we adults often do miss. We’re looking for more complicated answers. Lacking the simplicity of young children, we associate God with things that are dramatic and spectacular, like the choir of angels appearing to the shepherds, and the star which guided the Wise Men to Bethlehem. It’s easy for us to miss God’s presence and action in something as ordinary as pregnancy and birth. 

That explains why so many of Jesus’ own people failed to recognize him as their long-awaited Messiah. The popular expectation was that the Messiah would come dramatically, and unexpectedly. Jesus’ people had a saying: “Three things come wholly unexpected: the Messiah, a godsend, and a scorpion.” No one expected God’s anointed servant to come as a normal nursing baby born to a young girl in a small village. People expected him to drop unexpected from the sky, full-grown in his royal regalia and power. What more fitting landing place for the Messiah than the Temple mount in the holy city of Jerusalem, venerated by Jesus’ people as the earthly dwelling place of God? This helps us understand why one way the devil tempted Jesus during his forty days’ fast in the wilderness was by suggesting that he jump down from a pinnacle of the Temple. 

How could people raised on such expectations reconcile them with this man Jesus who been born and raised in their midst? “We know where this man is from,” they say in John’s gospel. “But when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.” (Jn 7:27) Matthew reports a similar reaction to Jesus. When Jesus returned to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and taught in the synagogue there, the people asked: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? ... Where did he get all this? They found him altogether too much for them.”  (Mt 13:55f)   

It is easy to criticize Jesus’ contemporaries for failing to recognize him. But are we really more clear-sighted than they were? When God first came to us in human form he did so not dramatically on the clouds of heaven, but through the nine months’ pregnancy of a simple country girl, and through thirty years of the normal human process of growth, infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. That tells us something -- or at least it should. It tells us that God comes to us today as he did then: in ways we would never expect. More -- God comes to us, and is with us, when we think he’s not there at all. 

In the days after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York eighteen years ago, one of the television networks showed a group of people in New Jersey who had lost loved ones talking about that terrible day. “Where was God?” one man complained. “God wasn’t there.” Many people said or thought the same. The complaint is understandable. But it is wrong. It assumes that God is there to protect us from pain and suffering, or at least from disaster and tragedy. Often God does protect us. But not always. Our Christian and Catholic faith promises us something different. It gives us the promise, and the assurance, not that God will always protect us, but that God is with us in pain and suffering, and especially amid disaster and tragedy. 

“Where was God on September eleventh, 2001?” people ask. God was there in the countless acts of heroism, large and small, which were so widely reported in the days and weeks after the attack, and which still remain reason for gratitude, admiration, and wonder.  

God comes to us in more ordinary ways too -- not only when tragedy strikes. He comes to us, again and again, in the normal events of everyday life, in people we know and love -- but also in those we dislike and find difficult, sometimes impossible. 

God came to me sixty-three ago through a child’s voice on the other side of the confessional screen saying: “I stamp my foot at my mother and say No.” That hit me hard. That little one is so sorry for that small sin, I thought. My own sins are worse -- and I’m not that sorry. I believe that the Lord sent that child into my confessional to teach me a lesson. I never knew that child’s name. He or she is probably a grandparent now. But I’ve never forgotten what that little one taught me.

The Lord came to me more recently, and spoke to me, in words of a woman, a daily communicant, who said to me after many years of married life: “Father, when you walk up to the altar on your wedding day, you don’t see the Stations of the Cross.” Preaching recently to a group of men preparing for ordination as permanent deacons, and to their wives, I quoted those words. As I did so I could see heads nodding all over the chapel.   

An African proverb says: “Listen, and you will hear the footsteps of the ants.” God’s coming to us is often as insignificant as the footsteps of ants. God is coming to each one of us, right now. He is knocking on the door of our hearts. He leaves it to us whether we open the door. How often we have refused to do so, trying to keep God at a distance because we fear the demands he will make on us.  Yet God continues to come to us, and to knock. He never breaks in. He waits for us to open the door. As long as life on this earth lasts, God will never take No as our final answer.

Refusing to open the door means shutting out of our lives the One who alone can give our lives meaning; who offers us the strength to surmount suffering; the One who alone can give us fulfillment, happiness, and peace.  Keeping the door of our hearts shut to God means missing out on the greatest chance we shall ever be offered; failing to appear for our personal rendezvous with destiny.

Opening the door to God, letting him into our lives, means embarking on life’s greatest adventure. This is the most worthwhile thing we can do with our lives -- at bottom the only thing worth doing. When we open the door to God, when we say our Yes to him, we place ourselves on the side of the simple Jewish girl whom we encounter in today’s gospel. When she opened the door to God and said her Yes to him, she was able to speak words that would be the height of arrogant conceit were it not for one thing: they were true:

“All generations shall call me blessed.” (Lk 1:48)

THE GENEALOGY OF JESUS CHRIST

Homily for December 17^th 2019: Matthew 1:1-17.

          To come to Mass eight days before Christmas each year and to hear this long list of mostly strange sounding Hebrew names – a challenge to any priest or deacon reading them – is discouraging, to say the least. And when we get to the end and find that Jesus’ ancestry has been traced not to Mary but to Joseph, his legal but not his biological father, is jarring. What can we say about all this?

          The list contains both saints and grave sinners. They symbolize all of us, with our strengths and weaknesses, who need the saving power of God. Jesus came, humanly speaking, from some great and talented people, but equally from the poor and insignificant. God, this list tells us, writes straight with crooked lines. He has certainly done that in my life. Which of you could not say the same about yours?

          Especially interesting are the women in the list. The first mentioned is Tamar, a Gentile outside God’s Chosen People, who seduced her father-in-law, Judah, so that she could have a child. The next woman is another Gentile outsider, a prostitute named Hagar, honored by the Jews despite her sinful way of life, because she hid and thus saved from execution the Jewish men sent out by Moses’ successor Joshua to spy out the future home of God’s people. Then there is Ruth, another outsider, though no sinner. Bathsheba, also a Gentile, is not even mentioned by name. She is identified simply as the one “who had been the wife of Uriah.” She was the one who committed adultery with David – whose advances she could hardly refused, given the absolute power of a king in those days. And at the end of her life she would scheme to make sure that one of her own offspring would inherit David’s throne.

          The late great American biblical scholar Raymond Brown writes: “The God who wrote the beginnings on crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of these are own lives and witness.” Christianity is not just for the talented, the good, the humble and honest. No one is so bad, so insignificant, so devoid of talent that he or she is outside the circle of Jesus Christ. And that includes all of us here today.

BY WHAT AUTHORITY?

Homily Dec. 16, 2019: Matthew 21:23-27.

          In Jesus’ day, and still in rabbinical schools today, it was common to settle disputed matters by asking one another questions. That is what is going on in the gospel reading we have just heard. “By what authority are you doing these things,” the religious authorities at Jerusalem ask Jesus. They want to know who had given Jesus the authority to cleanse the Temple, as Jesus has just done. Jesus responds with a counter-question: “Who gave John the Baptist the authority to baptize?”

          His critics recognize at once that whatever they answer, they will be in trouble. If they say that John preached and baptized by God’s authority, Jesus will ask them why they did not believe John. If the critics say that John the Baptist’s authority came from himself only, they will incriminate themselves with the people, who regarded John as a prophet sent by God. The critics take the safe way out by saying simply: “We do not know.” To which Jesus responds: “Neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

          What does this tell us? It tells us that we cannot demand from God explanations which make sense to us of things we do not understand -- injustice and suffering, for instance. The Old Testament book of Job is about a man who demanded this of God. Job is an upright and good man who suffers a series of major calamities. Why, he asks God – but receives no answer: until finally God appears and asks a series of questions which Job is unable to answer. Where were you, Job, when I made, the sea, the land, the stars of heaven; the birds, the beasts, and man himself? The point of these rhetorical questions is to make Job understand that there is no equality between man and God. The book ends with Job accepting that he, a mere man, cannot demand answers of God. “I have dealt with great things that I do not understand,” Job confesses. “I had heard of you by word of mouth. But now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes.” (22:2-6).

          Jesus never promised that all would go well with us, or that we would understand when it does not. He promises one thing only: to be with us in good times and bad; and when we encounter suffering and injustice to give us not understanding, but the strength to go on.