Ordinary Time, 14th Sunday (B) Life is not meant to be easy. The more we try to live a comfortable life, the more miserable we become. When Jesus comes to save us, he doesn't come to take away our pain and suffering. He comes to suffer with us and to suffer for us.
Have you had a moment yet when God became real for you? For many, it happened when they experienced suffering. The very thing we run from, the very thing we try so hard to numb and avoid, actually is the place we are most likely to experience God.
God needs to give us suffering, hardships, and thorns in the flesh to shake us out of our self-reliance. The "perfect Catholic mom" is the one who accepts her weaknesses and relies on God's strength, not on herself. A Christian man knows that when he is too weak to rely on himself, it is then that he is truly strong.
(7 Jul 2024)
Going Deeper: When have you experienced weakness such that you had no choice but to rely on God?
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[music] Hi, I'm Father Joel, and welcome to Pilgrim Breeze. So on this Independence Day weekend, I'd like to do a shout-out to the good people of St. James and Stanislaus Parish who are salt and light and always a joy to be with God bless you and keep up the good work. [music] The Bible begins with God creating the world and making human beings and putting us in the garden and it's a beautiful place. And then Adam and Eve sin, they refuse to listen to God, they don't trust that their Father knows best. And God punishes them with hard labor. It says to Adam, "By the sweat of your brow will you eat flesh from the earth." In other words, the idea is that thorns and thistles are growing up. Why is it hard work? Why is it hard work to make a living? Well, because it's part of that, it's that hard labor that he's punished with. And for Eve, hard labor is the pain of childbirth. It's going to be why is childbearing painful? Well, because of your sins, that's why. Great biblical answer, right? Because of your sins. Why do mosquitoes exist? Well, because of your sins, obviously. [laughter] But God is a good Father, and therefore his punishment isn't arbitrary. His punishment is meant to be a cure. It's meant to cure the problem. My dad was caught smoking, and his grandfather made him smoke the rest of the pack. After being the sickest he's ever been in his life, my dad decided not to pick up smoking. Now, I don't necessarily recommend that as a parenting move, but in this case, it worked. The punishment is meant to be a cure. In other words, God wants us to work for the paradise that he has prepared for us. He wants us to participate. He wants us to not be afraid of hard work. We know that kids who grow up on farms tend to learn to work hard. And it's something you pick up early, whereas kids who grow up in the suburbs tend to learn to be comfortable. And then they get a rather unfortunate experience when they get older. Life is not easy. Life is difficult. And the more we try to make life easy, the more difficult it actually becomes. The more painful is the experience. The problem is nowadays we've worked really hard to bring all kinds of comforts and eliminate all kinds of suffering. Now we have epidurals for your pregnancy. Now we have air conditioned offices for you to work in. Life starts to become more comfortable, and we forget this simple reality, the importance of suffering in our daily life, the importance of suffering along with God, and that anything worth doing is a pain in the butt. And so if you really want to accomplish great things, you can't be afraid of working hard. You can't be afraid of challenges. You can't be afraid of suffering. This is an essential message of the gospel. And it's not that God doesn't love us, but that God knows that when we live the more comfortable a life we live, the more unhappy we become. And so God wants us to not seek immediate comfort. My little nieces were here for the 4th of July parade and collected lots of candy. And boy, those girls can eat candy. It's sort of funny when they reach in the bag, take a piece of candy. Oh, this isn't until my liking. Here's a different piece, right? Even the candy. Even the candy isn't up to there, it's up to snuff, right? Well, you can eat candy all the time. If you do, then you'll get cavities, and then you'll have a different sort of suffering, right? So the suffering of putting down the candy is the lesser of the two evils. This is part of the point that Scripture is making. So when Jesus comes to save us, he doesn't come to take away our pain. He doesn't come to take away our suffering. He doesn't come to magically transform this world and our lives into the paradise that we dream of. Well, then what good is salvation, right? What good is salvation if we long for a more comfortable life and living for Jesus doesn't give us that? Jesus comes to suffer with us and to suffer for us. That's exactly the message, is that Jesus wants to give us the greatest possible gift, and in order to do that, he has to be willing to endure the greatest possible suffering. That the gift that Jesus wants to give us, his infinite love, and ultimately the Father's house, the true paradise that we long for, actually comes through suffering. And so Jesus embraces suffering, he accepts it, but you'll notice he doesn't suffer alone. The Father is with him, and so is his mother Mary. The greatest suffering comes not from the pain that we experience, but from thinking that we have to do it alone, from feeling alone that no one is with us. Jesus wants to show us that especially when we are experiencing pain and suffering, he is especially close to us. And I think many of us have experienced that in our own lives. We went through particularly difficult times and we found that it was during those difficult times that we noticed God's presence. I often ask people, when did God become real for you? When did the existence of God move from something that someone else told you about to something that you knew for yourself? And I'll get all kinds of different answers from what I've always known God existed to, I still haven't had an experience where I know for sure that God is real. But for many people, the answer that I wasn't expecting was when my grandma died. Someone experienced a death of a close person, and it was that time, the time that you would think is the most painful and the most suffering, that was the moment when they felt closest to God. It wasn't precisely in that difficulty that they experienced God's closeness, God's compassion, God's love. This is a strange reality, the very thing we run from, the suffering and pain that we try so hard to numb and avoid, when we accept it, we also find that we are not alone, that the Lord is with us in the midst of our suffering. He didn't give us the suffering because he hates us, he gave it to us because he wants to free us from self-reliance. Self-reliance, when I think I can do it, when I've got this, when I have it figured out, when I'm going to run my own life, thank you very much God. All I want from you is really nice weather for the 4th of July weekend. Is that too much to ask? I'm going to run the rest of my life, I'm going to figure everything out, I'm going to bring all the stuff up, and then you're going to give me the good weather, right God? That seems to be how we think that God should be running life. And then when it doesn't go our way, we get annoyed at God. When God didn't give us exactly what we wanted, we got mad at him. One woman told me that her conversion happened when she was driving in the car, and her kid was in the car seat in the back, and her daughter was complaining that she couldn't have exactly what she wanted. And she said, "Honey, I love you, that's why I don't always give you what you want." And then it dawned on her that God loved her, and that's why God doesn't always give her exactly what she wanted. And that was the beginning of a conversion for her from being angry at God for not being there for her, to realize that God was giving her what was even better than the things that she was asking for. So in our first reading, the prophet is being sent, Ezekiel is going to be sent to a people, and I love that. God's like, they're hard of heart, like these are stubborn people. They're not going to listen to you, but at least they'll know that a prophet was sent to them. What a great mission, right? He already knows his mission is going to fail. But his mission is not to turn the people back to God's hearts. His mission is for him to reveal to them that God has not given up on them, that God is still with them. But that God is inviting them to stop doing things their way, to stop following what they think is best, and to start listening to him. And this is often what God does for us. He needs to shake us out of our self-reliance, out of our self-dependence. St. Paul accepts this thorn in the flesh, this suffering that he's experiencing that God won't take away, because he realizes that it allows him to rely on the power of God, and not on his own power. And that's been my experience again and again. I'm smart, I'm good looking, and gosh darn it, people like me, as they say. And so I thought, when I was newly ordained as a priest, that a few years of me preaching some good homilies and doing a great job teaching people about the faith, and boy churches would be full, right? I thought that I would accomplish the mission with my own hard work. And what the Lord has shown me again is again, is the person who most needs conversion is me. Like, I'm the one who needs to let go of myself reliance. I'm the one who needs to trust in God. He needs to stop telling God, well this is what me being a successful priest would look like. Okay, here's my list, God, is that too much to ask? And the Lord said, I've got a better idea for you. I want you to fail at all the things that you think you should be successful at, so that you'll let me show you how to be a good priest. So many times when people have kids, they're like, I'm failing as a mom, good. Because you had your list of what the perfect Catholic mom was supposed to look like, and then you set out to discover I'm not the perfect Catholic mom. Yeah, you know you're not. But the perfect Catholic mom is the one who doesn't have to have it all together, who doesn't have to have it all figured out, who is willing to rely on God. So often we guys have a hard time trusting that God knows what's best. We think we need to have it figured out, and the last thing we want to admit is that I don't have it together. One of the Father's Day reflections really spoke to me. It was a man who explained that his biggest experience of conversion was watching his dad pray and realizing that his dad needed to rely on somebody bigger than himself, that his father needed a father. And his father's reliance on his heavenly father taught an important lesson about where a man's strength really comes from. That a man shouldn't rely on himself for wisdom and guidance, but should rely on God. And in accepting God's guidance, he was then able to be a good father. And he said years later, his son told him, "Dad watching you pray helped me realize that you were relying on God where your strength came from." So don't be afraid to let your kids see you pray, to lead your family in prayer, to trust in God. And the alternative is pretty. The alternative is us being blaming everyone else. Everyone else for why I have failed, for why I have not succeeded. Because I relied on myself, I thought I had it figured out, and then it failed. And then it didn't work out the way I thought. And so when I rely on myself, I'm going to be disappointed. And I'm going to need to blame everyone else, because I don't want to have to admit that I came up short. When I rely on God, I start by assuming that I'm coming up short, that I don't have everything it takes. But with God's, with God, all things are possible. That I'm just a little helper, and God is my father, and he's guiding me and showing me how to work along with daddy. This is how Jesus lives his life. Jesus does not succeed in saving us by relying on his own strength, his own wisdom. He relies on his heavenly father. That's where Jesus gets all this. So Jesus is back to his hometown. He visits, checks out Nazareth High. He sees the old coffee shop that he used to hang out at, or whatever he did growing up. And everyone else, everyone around is amazed at Jesus's cures. They're amazed at Jesus's wisdom, but not his hometown. They're like, we know this guy. We grew up with him. What has he got? And I feel that that's often the experience that Catholics have. In a sense, we grew up with Jesus. We know him, or we think we know him. We think we know what our Catholic faith is all about. And the rest of the world would kill for what we have. For what we have received. This beautiful gift of God's love. For us of knowing God's love from a young age. Of knowing the truths of the church and how we can direct our life in the best way possible. And yet we have a tendency to have a bend there done that. I heard it all already. Kind of attitude to our Catholic faith. As though we grew up with Jesus and we already know him. Has God become real for you? If not, look for him in suffering. [ Music ] I couldn't find any good knock knock jokes about America. But that's because freedom rings. [ Laughter ] I told the Liberty Bell that joke and it cracked right up. (audience laughs)
