Lent IV Year A 2023
Commentators have described the many months that this country has been beset with strikes as being akin to the winter of discontent. Patients are suffering, commuters are suffering, pupils are suffering. And where there is suffering, there is usually a desire to find someone to blame. The blame can often be easily placed on the other, those who are different, and it seems that for HM Government, those to blame for the pressure on our national services are those who come to this country by boat across the English Channel. If the policy of ‘stopping the boats’ is brought into law, anyone who arrives on a small boat will have their asylum claimed deemed inadmissible. They will either be deported back to their own country, or if the flights take off, to that safe-haven of Rwanda. Last year 45,755 men, women and children came into this country via the channel. Yes, they came illegally, but of that number, over 50% came from these five countries: Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Syria. Traumatised people, fleeing conflict and persecution, who risk their life in seeking refuge, will now be criminalized. Because its easy to find someone to blame.
Lent calls us to become more like Jesus. It asks us to consider how do we imitate him, how do we face temptation, how do we pray, and this Sunday we are challenged to consider how Jesus looks at suffering in the world. If we had heard the whole of chapter 9 of John’s Gospel today, we would have heard that when Jesus encountered the blind man, his disciples asked him whether it was the sin of the man or of his parents which caused him to be blind. What lies at the root of their question, is what often lies at the heart of our questioning when we encounter suffering. Who is to blame for this suffering, who is responsible for this?
The disciples’ reaction was understandable. In the Book of Proverbs, they would have heard the teaching that if you do good, you get good, if you do bad, you get bad. It follows therefore that something bad must have occurred for the man to be blind. And we might find ourselves in a similar mindset, we want a reason for the problem. Those who find it difficult to trust in relationships may say it’s because they have been betrayed or wounded before. Those who are overly- defensive may say its because they were mocked or judged as a child. Those perhaps who wake up in the morning with a pain in the back or in a joint, seek to identify its source. Mowing the lawn, moving furniture, or perhaps genuflecting too often. Seeking to find the source of the problem, of blaming someone for suffering was particularly highlighted during the pandemic. ‘You’ve got Covid, who did you get it from?
As human beings we spend time and energy on finding the source of our pain and suffering. We do so because we do not want the reason to be our responsibility, the result of our actions, our decisions. But then we are faced with suffering for which there is no rationale. Many life-limiting illnesses or degenerative diseases have no clear cause. They are situations not of our own choosing, wounds which were not self-inflicted nor inflicted by others. It is simply suffering. Accepting that truth is challenging.
That’s why how we respond is so crucial, that’s why following the example of Jesus is the only means by which we will be free of the what, why, the who? Because Jesus told his disciples that the blind man, like all who suffer, is doing so in order that the works of God might be known. Jesus teaches his disciples that we may not know the cause of suffering, but we can glimpse what could happen because of it. When the blind man is healed, he comes to believe. God is glorified through the suffering that the blind man experienced.
But that is not a truth we easily accept. Like the prophet Job, we might get tired of suffering. We might get tired of the suffering we experience physically, mentally, emotionally. We might just have had enough and rail and cry and shout and say: Why? Why? Why? The difficulty is for those of us who profess to be Christian, God does not answer that question. Rather he shows himself amidst the suffering. He manifests himself in the pain and the confusion and the heartache. Think of the example of Pope St John Paul II. The successor of St Peter, Vicar of Christ, leader of the Church Catholic, and he was beset for many years of his pontificate by Parkinson’s Disease. God revealed through his suffering, that holiness does not necessarily come from the physically strong, or those most erudite of speech. John Paul II showed through his later ministry that vulnerability, weakness, humility are also God given gifts. And that can be the experience of those of us not raised to the altar. In my own life, amidst a time of suffering within my family when I was a child, it was in that time of pain, that I found a greater family, a loving family, a family that also wanted to embrace me, that family’s name was the Church. Often it is through suffering that we can glimpse the gate of heaven, that we can glimpse something of the love of God.
Waheed Arian arrived in this country illegally aged 15. Born into the war-torn country of Afghanistan, he spent several years in a refugee camp in Pakistan where he contracted malaria and TB. He fled from Afghanistan when a bomb demolished his neighbour’s house and killed the family within it. He arrived on these shores alone, with a fake passport provided by an agent, spent 10 days in HMP Feltham before being granted asylum. He has worked since 2010 as a doctor and radiologist in the NHS. Are he and other refugees like him to blame for our crumbling health service, or the lack of pay for teachers or poor transport connections?
It’s easy to find someone to blame for the suffering we experience but Jesus teaches us in the Gospel that from suffering we can experience good things. That like the story of Waheed we can turn our time of suffering, into something good and profitable. God does not reveal the cause of our suffering, but he walks amidst it and proves to us that he can do something with it. We just need the grace of God-given sight to behold it.
Homily Lent 5 Year A 2023
During this season of Lent the Church calls us to consider how we seek to imitate Christ. How we become more like him in battling temptation, in prayer, in responding to suffering. In today’s Gospel we are challenged to consider how can our heart become more like His?
That might seem a rather strange idea to pick amidst the treasure that is today’s Gospel, from the faithfulness of Martha and Mary to the bodily resurrection of Lazarus, to the response of the Jews to this miracle. There is a wealth of material. Yet I want us to think about one verse alone. Verse 35. It contains only two words; it is the shortest verse in the whole of scripture: ‘Jesus wept.’
It would be easy to skip pass that verse, but to fail to recognise the importance of those words, is to fail to recognise the mystery of the incarnation, part of what it means that God became man so that we might become more like him.
But we might sit here at Mass and say, well why did he weep? Surely Jesus knew the end to this story, why did he need to cry, he is the Son of God, he knew the outcome.
But we weep, don’t we? We might weep when something gets stuck in our eye, to relieve tension, to signal distress. But often our weeping stems from experiencing extreme emotions. There are times when we may have wept for joy, wept due to our anxiety, wept because we were embarrassed, and wept when we experience loss. When someone we love dies, we weep. It’s a human experience recorded in scripture, Abraham wept when his wife Sarah died, King David wept when his rebellious son Absalom was slain.
But why did Jesus weep? Those two words were recorded by St John for a reason, that they might teach us something about the nature, about the heart of Jesus.
Jesus wept in order that he might silence the great fear that exists in everyone of us.That great fear is the cry of every person who feels forgotten, every person who feels left out, every person who has had their pain or grief or loss unnoticed. The voice that cries out, God do you not care about me? When I make sacrifices for you and your Church, does that not matter?
That great fear must have resided within those two sisters. Martha and Mary were heartbroken, their brother had died, despite their efforts to reach Christ with the news of his illness, they had failed to save Lazarus and so they were distraught. But neither says to him: ‘Do you not care my brother has died?’ Why?
Because Jesus wept. He was not indifferent, through his tears they knew they mattered to him, they knew that Lazarus mattered, they knew their loss mattered. Their great fear was responded to.
And do you know what? You matter to him too. For as Jesus wept for them, so he weeps for you. When you cry out, he is not indifferent, he is not forgetful, he is not dismissive. He is there amidst your pain and your sorrow. He may not answer in the way you hope or pray, but he is there. Because although Christ teaches us through the miracle performed upon Lazarus that God is glorified, so he teaches us through the faith, trust and love of Martha and Mary that God is glorified through their life too. That those who don’t get the miracle and still walk in faith glorify God by their lives.
Jesus weeps to answer our fears, he weeps because he loves. When we read this Gospel, we might think it rather strange that despite knowing of the desperate illness of his close friend, Jesus waits two days before departing to see him. Why was that? You would recall that in John’s Gospel, the last time Jesus was in Judea the authorities were trying to kill him. Jesus knows that by turning his face towards Judea this will be the beginning of the end. That waking Lazarus from the dead will be costly. For what happens next? Many come to believe, but if we carry on reading the very next chapter we are amidst the events of Palm Sunday. Jesus weeps because he loves us, and that love is costly. The beauty of the Christian faith is that when we are heartbroken, whether it be because of the death of one we love, or a hope that has been extinguished and the world around us says ‘just get over it, just move on, just think about something else’ our saviour doesn’t look down on our broken hearts. He allows what breaks our heart to break his, because he loves us, he enters our grief, because we are to him, beloved.
Jesus weeps to answer our fears, he weeps because he loves us and he weeps to teach us to weep. This Lent we have been undertaking the Bread of Life Course. And a few weeks ago in our discussion we reflected on how willing or unwilling we might be to express emotion during worship. How unsettling it might be if a person in the pew began to weep. Jesus’ example of weeping teaches that because you are His disciple it doesn’t mean you don’t grieve. That because you profess to be a Christian you don’t mourn. We should cry, we should weep, we should mourn. But there should be a difference to our expression of such emotions. Because we should cry and weep and mourn as those with hope. That’s what Jesus has given to us, hope. He teaches us to weep because through his death and resurrection he has given us hope.
Jesus wept. Two simple words to remember from today’s Gospel. Yet they are words which should inspire our hearts to become more like his. For through those tears Jesus answers our fears. Through those tears he expresses his love for us, through those tears he teaches us that it is ok to cry and weep and mourn, but he has given us hope to keep on living. These words of the 19th century American writer Washington Irving express it better than I can:
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”