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Third Sunday of Easter B
April 22, 2012

Reading I: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19
Responsorial Psalm: 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9
Reading II: 1 John 2:1-5a
Gospel: Luke 24:35-48

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042212.cfm

Gospel Luke 24:35-48 (in part):

He said to them,
"These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the law of Moses
and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled."
Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.
And he said to them,
"Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer
and rise from the dead on the third day
and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,
would be preached in his name
to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things."



I'm busy this week putting a new floor in the laundry. The washing machine has been on the verandah for over a year, and it's time to get things done. But it does take more concentration than most things I do, so the reflections have suffered.

My focus has been on that remark that Luke put in both the Gospel and the Acts: "It is written that the Christ would suffer."

Luke says that Jesus opened the scriptures for them. It's a pity he didn't tell us what he actually said about WHY the Christ would suffer. It seems that we are still puzzled about this, even if we are no longer shocked as the disciples were in those first weeks.

Isaiah himself is responsible for saying that the suffering servant was beaten for our sins and bore our iniquities, ideas which lie at the basis of the concept that his death was a sacrifice of atonement, the Son taking on himself the punishment due to all his brothers for their sins. He suffered in our place, instead of us!

Many today feel that this does not work, but surely we ought to be able to give some account of suffering since what Jesus endured is at the very centre of our faith. If we believe anything about Jesus it must include the notion that he 'took on' suffering. He could have dodged capture at the time; he might have lasted for years up country, sniping from afar instead of confronting the authorities in their very temple; Pilate even tried to find a way to let him off, but Jesus kept silent, refusing to go along with it. Why?

Cardinal Pell, in that famous Q&A, confessed he did not know why a compassionate god would allow suffering. After two thousand years we ought to know something. To me, the question is wrong, and I agree with Dawkins that suffering is just part of evolution, which is just the way a violent universe develops. After all violence is at the core of the whole thing. It starts with a big bang and soon there are fireballs, billions of them, coursing around, now and then crashing into one another - and here and there a nice cool little rock on which life might develop. Life struggles out of decay, flourishes for a moment, and itself turns to decay. That grain of wheat again.

Intelligent life seems to be a high point in this process. We can ask questions; we can learn how to change the course of 'nature'. We can discover ways to short out the pathways of pain so that surgeons can cut open our body, remove some diseased part, and put everything back together, and we scarcely feel a thing. We may be crook for a few days, and it may take weeks to get back on our feet, but then we go on for decades, none the worse for it all. True, there are people who suffer unimagineable pain and that we have yet to find a way to stop.

The question, then, confronting intelligent life is:  How do we manage pain and suffering? That is a big-enough question to occupy all our minds, without going off on a tangent wondering why 'god' made it so. How did Jesus manage suffering?

First, he cured what he could, and he showed kindness to those who came to him. Secondly, he shared in it. He was a worker, and during those three years he is said to have been often completely exhausted trying to respond to the people who came for a word of hope or comfort. Above all he taught that intelligent beings do not inflict pain on others.

The cheek of us. We think it smart to ask why did a compassionate god create a world in which there is suffering, while we train armies of professional killers - and send them out to wreak pain and misery on whole populations - in our name. We consider we have the right to punish wrong-doers, inflicting pain in proportion to the crime. It is like the way we criticise the Inquisition of long ago or the barbarity of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes while we remain quiescent about the practice of torture by our own police states. (Yes, I refer to Guantanamo Bay and all it stands for, and yes, this horror is perpetrated by our ALLY, our friend, the protector of our freedom and our partner in warfare - the USA.) For years we in the wide brown land of Oz have locked up people for the 'crime' of trying to find a place to live among us, keeping them in 'confinement' until they go mad.

Why does a compassonate god allow suffering? Indeed!

Why did the Christ suffer? Because he tried with all his might to teach us a lesson, and still we don't get it. Sure, individually we do, but when push comes to shove there are not enough of us ready to stand in front of the tanks, or the bulldozers, or the bullies in our parliaments... Christ did not suffer so that we might escape. Christ set us an example to follow, declaring in plain language that the truth is worth speaking up for, worth labouring for, worth dying for.

I wanted to say to Cardinal Pell:  “You are the teacher of Israel and you do not understand this? Amen, amen, I say to you, we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you people do not accept our testimony. If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?" (Jn 3:10-12)

I wish we could all be clear on this: the Christ would suffer because he would get involved in the human condition, not stand above and apart from it. He would suffer because he would join in the struggle to push, or drag, humankind from this brute level of inflicting pain to get our way or in retribution - to an intelligent level of com-passion, caring, kindness and self-giving love.

Put yourself in your opponent's shoes. Do to him what you'd like him to do to you.

PS. Jesus in the gospel is a realist. Somewhere he says theere will be wars and so on. As a realist I also recognise the need for strong discipline in a community, for a good police force to keep the majority safe from the rogue elements. What shocks me is that in a discussion about principles our 'leader' could make a supercilious joke about having not a word to say on suffering. This is not a problem just for George Pell. It is a blindness among us all. It's time we stopped asking the wrong question and found our answer to the one in the gospel: Why did the Christ suffer?