the-cross

The Silence of God

Deacon Douglas McManaman

One of the most pressing questions people have, young students especially, has to do with the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? And if God exists, how can he allow so much suffering and evil in the world? Questions bearing upon the tragedies that befall the innocent are very puzzling to say the least, and they are downright scandalous for some, to the point where many have simply rejected outright the very notion that a good God exists.

The philosophical resolutions of such questions are certainly interesting and perhaps persuasive to a good number of people, and they usually include the point that human beings have the power of free choice, and when we choose to do things our way instead of God’s way, life begins to fall apart. A more sophisticated response is that God is all powerful and he is supremely and perfectly good, which means that 1) he wills your perfect happiness and 2) has the power to bring about your greatest happiness; hence, whatever God allows to happen to you in your life, he allows ultimately for your greatest happiness.

There is nothing wrong with these arguments per se; they are sound. However, one does not want to be engaging in this kind of discourse when in the presence of someone who is broken by the loss of her own son, or who has been suffering from clinical depression all her life or someone with PTSD as a result of being exposed to the horrors of war or the evils that are around us but hidden from most people, except police officers and undercover agents. It’s much easier to be impressed with certain abstract ideas in the presence of like-minded people far removed from such suffering, but when in the presence of a person who is in deep darkness, suffering in ways that we’ve never experienced, we begin to sense the inadequacies of our neat and tidy solutions. If we were to push them onto our suffering brethren anyways, ignoring our deepest intuition to keep quiet, we’d see firsthand that our answers only increase their feelings of alienation, isolation, and darkness. The only response these situations call for is utter silence. We just need to be present to them in their suffering; for there are no words that can relieve them of their darkness and the pain they have to live with. The only thing that will bring them any sort of consolation is our silent presence, which acknowledges our inability to console them with words, ideas, platitudes, or rational discourse. 

Their suffering is a great mystery; for their lives and all that has happened that plunged them into darkness is in many ways beyond our ability to fully comprehend. It is opaque and larger than ourselves, and our task is to remain quiet and listen, share in their suffering, participate in it, feel it; for the more we feel it, the more we relieve them of their loneliness and sense of abandonment. 

And that is why Good Friday is the ultimate answer to the mystery of suffering. God does not deliver us a series of premises that entail a conclusion that is supposed to satisfy the mind. Rather, God the Son descends among us, joins himself to a human nature and enters into our darkness. The light of the world enters into the darkness of human suffering not because he wants to understand our suffering–God is all knowing, so he does not lack any understanding. Rather, he joins himself to our flesh, our suffering, our human situation, tastes misunderstanding and rejection, becomes the object of death threats and attempts on his life, was rejected by some of his disciples who couldn’t tolerate his claim to be the Bread of Life, and experiences the worst physical suffering, his passion and death, all this in order to be present in silence to the sufferings of each human person, the sufferings we have undergone and are currently undergoing and have yet to undergo in our lives. He who is Life Itself dies in order to be present in our death, that we might find him there. All this so that our suffering will not be an experience of complete and utter desolation and loneliness. We still suffer, but there is a divine presence in that suffering, a Person who is there paying close attention to each one of us. Scripture assures us that this Person, this presence, is even in the very bowels of hell: “If I climb to the heavens you are there, if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there” (Ps 139, 8). 

I’ve always said to my mental health patients that you accompany Christ in his suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he accompanies you in yours–while Peter, James, and John sleep. They cannot stay awake, but you stay awake; for your depression keeps you from the peace of restful slumber. That is your gift to him, and it is the deepest sharing in his passion. Moreover, friendships are based on common qualities, and you have something in common with Christ, namely innocent suffering and mental anguish, and this common factor establishes an identity that is an eternal source of joy.

God is so good that he chooses to taste complete alienation even from himself; for God the Son experiences the anguish of the Father’s silence: Jesus receives no response from God to his anguished prayer to let this cup pass him by (Mk 14, 32-42), and there is no answer to his final words on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mk 15, 34). And this very lament was uttered centuries earlier by a victim of injustice:  

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why so far from my call for help, from my cries of anguish? My God, I call by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief (Ps 22, 2-3).

His words have become Christ’s words, or better yet, they were Christ’s words from the beginning, for God the Son is eternal, embracing all time and place. Like the psalmist, we too keep Christ company when we suffer what he suffered. Nothing but the silence of his presence and ours adequately responds to the mystery of suffering. This alone gives us the strength to trust that our darkness and death are not the final word; the final word will be uttered three days later.   

Our Priestly, Prophetic, and Royal Identity

Reflection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_432feastholycrosshomily.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

After 400 years of slavery, the Hebrew people were finally delivered, and what a miraculous delivery it was, which Jews to this day remember at Passover. And yet, many of them became impatient on their way to the land of Canaan. They “spoke against God and against Moses”, and they detested the miserable food they were given to eat (Num 21, 4-9). 

Now I’ve never spent any time in the desert, and I have never felt hunger pangs or desert induced thirst, so I’m not going to pronounce judgment on these people, but it is rather clear that they have lost a sense of the importance of their own history, for they began to long for a return to life under Egyptian slavery, because they had better food: melons and other fruits, fish and meat, and as much bread as they could eat. It was this that they valued more than their very own identity as the covenant people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were willing to surrender that identity and remain in slavery, if it meant better quality food.

The God of the Old Testament took the initiative and revealed himself to Abraham and made a covenant with him, promising to make him the father of a great nation. Count the stars; that’s how numerous your descendents will be (Gn 15, 5). And this did not happen on account of anything Abraham did. It was an act of pure generosity. Furthermore, this gift was not merely for Abraham and his descendants, but was ordered to the whole of humanity: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; …All the families of the earth will find blessing in you” (Gn 12, 3). And God revealed to Abraham in a dream that his descendents will be slaves in a foreign land: “Know for certain that your descendants will reside as aliens in a land not their own, where they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation they must serve, and after this they will go out with great wealth” (Gn 15, 13).

These people under Moses are the very fulfillment of that promise; for they were on their way to the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, and it is from this land that blessing will go forth to all of humanity, ultimately through Jesus, whose covenant will extend to the whole of humanity. The dignity of that Jewish identity has immeasurable value, but many of them, in the circumstances of the desert, forgot about it or became indifferent to it when they began to compare the quality of food they enjoyed in Egypt with the food they have now. 

We too have an identity, and it is linked to the identity of the Hebrew people who have been set free. We are the people who share in the blessing that was promised to Abraham, that all nations will be blessed through him. The saviour of humanity was born of a Jewish woman, and Christ came into this world in view of Good Friday, in order to enter into our death so as to destroy it, to inject it with his divine life so that death would no longer have the final word over your life and my life. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb delivered the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, so too the blood of the lamb of God delivers us from the slavery of sin and death. We are sons and daughters of Abraham in the Person of Christ, and when we were baptized, we were anointed with sacred chrism and given a share in the three-fold identity of Christ, namely that of “priest, prophet, and king”; for Christ is the eschatological priest who offered himself on the altar of the cross for the deliverance of humanity; he is the prophet that Moses spoke of in Deuteronomy, 18: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kindred, and will put my words into the mouth of the prophet and he shall tell them all that I command” (v. 18); and of course, Christ is the king of kings, a king who does not compel, but who defeats the one enemy that man could not defeat, namely death, by allowing himself to be swallowed up by death. 

So although you are not clergy, you are indeed priests. You exercise a genuine priesthood as a result of that baptismal anointing. Everything you do in life, such as ordinary parenting, or driving a truck, teaching children, nursing the sick, mopping floors, prosecuting the guilty or defending your clients, medical research, etc., is now made holy, for our life and labor is an offering lived out in the Person of Christ, for the bringing forth of God’s kingdom and the christification of the cosmos. The ministerial priesthood is ordered to serve this larger royal priesthood of the faithful, to help the faithful to become aware of that priestly identity, to maintain it, and not obscure it, as was done in the past. 

And you are prophets, for your new life is a genuine sharing in Christ’s prophetic office. That is precisely why Pope Francis taught that the Church is fundamentally Synodal, that is, a listening Church; for the Church is fundamentally a communio fidelium (a communion of the faithful), and the faithful have a genuine sensus fidelium (a sense of the faith) that arises from this communion, and according to Francis, the communio hierarchica (the hierarchical communion) must carefully listen to the unique and intuitive insights of the faithful, because as sharers in Christ’s prophetic office, the Lord speaks to the Church today through them. Francis writes: “Let us trust in our People, in their memory and in their ‘sense of smell,’ let us trust that the Holy Spirit acts in and with our People and that this Spirit is not merely the ‘property’ of the ecclesial hierarchy.”[1] Two years earlier he wrote: “To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the “fragrance” of the men of this age, so as to be permeated with their joys and hopes, with their griefs and anxieties. At that moment we will know how to propose the good news on the family with credibility.”[2]

And your new life is a share in Christ’s kingship. Whatever authority you have been given in this life, that is, in the family, or at school, at work, in government, etc., it is not to be exercised with a sense of self-importance, as a “lording over” others. All authority must become a genuine service and thus involve a kenotic lowering of self (Mt 20, 25-26; Phil 2, 1-8); for only in this way will the exercise of authority not spawn resistance and rebellion.

Priest, prophet, and king is our identity, and it is easy to forget that identity by becoming so caught up in the pleasures of this world that we begin to believe that this life is fundamentally about enjoyment and the pleasures of the present moment. The kingdom of God, says St. Paul, is not a matter of eating and drinking; rather, it is a matter of justice, harmony within humanity, and the joy of the Holy Spirit (Romans 14, 17), and our new life in Christ is to be directed to that universal brotherhood, which can only be established through the relentless pursuit of justice. 

The bronze serpent in the desert is a foreshadowing of Christ, the crucified and risen one. It is when we look upon him, our priest, prophet, and king that our lives are made whole. Of course, to “look upon” does not mean “a glance”. Rather, it means that this cross is the focal point of our existence, for the cross alone brings healing and power to our lives. And this is the paradox of Good Friday: our king is so powerful that he defeats his enemy by allowing himself to be defeated, and our source of strength and healing is precisely the weakness of God and the death of God. 

Notes

1. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to cardinal Marc Ouellet President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America”, 19 March 2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html. See also Ormond Rush. “Inverting the Pyramid: The Sensus Fidelium in a Synodal Church”. Theological Studies. 2017, Vol. 78(2) 299­ –325. 

2. Pope Francis, “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis during the Meeting on the Family” (Vatican City, October 4, 2014), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141004_incontro-per-la-famiglia.html. The call to listen has been very difficult for a good number of clerics who were raised within a certain theological paradigm in which clergy see themselves as an elite class with “all the answers”, while the laity are little more than passive receptacles of clerical wisdom from on high. In 1906, Pope Pius X wrote: “The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.” Pope Pius X, Vehementer Nos (February 11, 1906), 8, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_11021906_vehementer-nos.html.