450. Thirty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time (C)

Meditations no. 622 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Light shines in the darkness. Ignorance of Christ.

We read in the Gospel of today’s Mass that some of the members of the sect of the Sadducees, who were characterized by denying the resurrection of the dead, approach Jesus to know his thoughts on this subject; and they present him with a situation that, apparently, leads to a contradictory end. The Lord’s answer corrects the point of view of those men, who, by denying the resurrection of the dead, close their lives to God. Jesus said to them: “The children of this world, they and they, marry; however, those who are worthy to reach the other world and the resurrection of the dead, do not marry, neither they nor they. For they can no longer die again, for they are equal to the angels and children of God, being children of the resurrection. That the dead will rise is shown by Moses in the passage of the bush, when he calls the Lord God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob. But He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; all live for Him.

The Lord teaches them not only the truth of the doctrine of the resurrection, as part of the divine plan for men, but also the reality of God’s love, who wants us to be his children already on this earth and, after death, forever enjoying him in heaven. Jesus Christ came into the world so that men would stop struggling in darkness and, having light, could make the world a place where things would serve to give glory to God and help man to achieve his ultimate end. However, light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not receive it. These are current words for a good part of the world, which remains in the most complete darkness because, apart from Christ, men will never achieve peace, happiness, or salvation. Those who do not know or reject Christ are left without light and no longer know where the path goes. They are disoriented in the depths of their being.

In the absence of the light of Christ, many have come to consider the world as an end in itself; without any reference to God, they even go so far as to distort the most basic truths. In a particular way, in some countries, “many generations are being lost to Christ and to the Church in these years, and unfortunately from these places the weeds of a new paganism are sent to the whole world. This contemporary paganism is characterized by the search for material well-being at any cost, and by the corresponding forgetfulness - it would be better to say fear, authentic dread - of everything that can cause suffering. In this perspective, words such as God, sin, cross, mortification, eternal life… are incomprehensible to a large number of people, who are unaware of their meaning and content.”

In the midst of these circumstances, our Father’s warning acquires a particular relevance: people have a flat, two-dimensional vision, close to the earth. When you live a supernatural life, you will obtain from God the third dimension: height, and with it relief, weight, and volume. This is what we ask, in the second reading, in the words of St. Paul: that Our Lord Jesus Christ, and God our Father, who loved us and freely granted us eternal consolation and happy hope, may console your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word.

Jesus Christ teaches us the meaning of pain in the light of the mystery of the Redemption.

ONE of the aspects of human life that contemporary neopaganism has disfigured is that of suffering. Being one of the most common experiences, it has become a stone of scandal for many, and often rises like an immense wall that prevents them from seeing God and his infinite love for humanity. There is in the environment, wrote our Father, a kind of fear of the Cross, of the Cross of the Lord. And it is that they have begun to call all the unpleasant things that happen in life crosses, and they do not know how to bear them with the sense of children of God, with supernatural vision (…).

In the Passion, the Cross ceased to be a symbol of punishment to become a sign of victory. The Cross is the emblem of the Redeemer: in quo est salus, vita et resurrectio nostra: there is our health, our life and our resurrection.

In the face of sorrows of any kind that afflict human hearts, the Christian has only one authentic answer, an answer that is definitive: Christ on the Cross, God who suffers and dies, God who gives us his Heart, which he opened with a spear out of love for all (…). God our Lord does not cause the pain of creatures, but he tolerates it because-after original sin-he is part of the human condition. However, his Heart full of Love for men made him take upon himself, with the Cross, all those tortures: our suffering, our sadness, our anguish, our hunger and thirst for justice (…).

Pain is part of God’s plans. That is the reality, even if it is difficult for us to understand it. Also, as a Man, it was difficult for Jesus Christ to bear it: Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me, but not my will, but yours be done (Lk 22:42). In this tension of torture and acceptance of the Father’s will, Jesus goes to his death serenely, forgiving those who crucify him.

It is precisely this supernatural admission of pain that is at the same time the greatest conquest. Jesus, by dying on the Cross, has conquered death; God draws life from death. The attitude of a child of God is not that of one who resigns himself to his tragic misfortune, it is the satisfaction of one who already foresees victory. In the name of Christ’s victorious love, we Christians must set out on all the roads of the earth, to be sowers of peace and joy by our word and by our deeds. We must fight - a struggle of peace - against evil, against injustice, against sin, in order to proclaim that the present human condition is not the definitive one; that the love of God, manifested in the Heart of Christ, will achieve the glorious spiritual triumph of men.

Pain is a mystery, and yet the Christian with faith knows how to discover in the darkness of suffering, his own or that of others, the loving and provident hand of his heavenly Father, who knows more and sees further, and understands in some way the words of St. Paul to the first Christians of Rome: all things cooperate for the good of those who love God; even those that are painfully inexplicable or incomprehensible to us. The Cross was the instrument chosen by the Lord to save us. He could have used another, but he wanted to redeem us through suffering. Since then, pain has a new meaning, only comprehensible with him. This has been the great Christian revolution: to turn pain into fruitful suffering; to do, from evil, good. We have stripped the devil of that weapon. … and, with it, we conquer eternity.

Love the Cross when suffering is present in our lives.

THE LORD wants us to avoid pain and to fight against sickness with all the means at our disposal; but he desires, at the same time, that we give a sense of redemption and personal purification to our sorrows and tribulations; even to those that seem to us unjust or disproportionate. This doctrine filled St. Paul with joy in his prison, and he manifested it to the first Christians of Asia Minor: now I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and I complete in my flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the benefit of his body, which is the Church.

When pain is looked at in the light of faith, its fruitful meaning is discovered and the soul is filled with peace. The First Reading of today’s Mass reminds us of this, when we are presented with the story of those seven brothers who, in the midst of the torments inflicted because of their faith in the divine promises, never lost peace of soul or the sure hope of the glorious resurrection.

On occasion, we will encounter the Cross in great difficulty, in a serious and painful illness, in an economic disaster, in the death of a loved one.

Let us not forget, then, that to be with Jesus is surely to run into his Cross. When we abandon ourselves into God’s hands, he often allows us to taste pain, loneliness, contradictions, slander, slander, mockery, inside and out: because he wants to conform us to his image and likeness, and he also tolerates being called crazy and taken for fools.

It is time to love the passive mortification that comes-hidden or shameless and insolent-when we do not expect it. The Lord will give us the strength to carry that cross with grace and will fill us with graces and unimaginable fruits. We understand that God blesses his friends in many ways, and often, making us sharers of his Cross and co-redeemers with him.

Ordinarily, however, the Cross is present to us in the small setbacks of the day: an unforeseen event that we did not count on, differences in character with the people with whom we live, work tools that break down when they were most needed, difficulties caused by cold or heat, misunderstandings, a slight illness that makes us less able to work that day. … The cross every day. Nulla dies sine cruce!, no day without a Cross: no day, in which we do not carry the Cross of the Lord, in which we do not accept his yoke. For this reason, as St. Irenaeus of Lyons writes, “we too, accepting the same faith that Abraham professed, let us follow Christ carrying the Cross as Isaac carried wood.”

Pain, small or great, accepted and offered to the Lord, produces peace and serenity; when it is not accepted, the soul is out of tune and with an intimate rebellion that immediately manifests itself externally in the form of sadness or bad mood. Before the small cross of each day, we must take a decisive attitude and carry it with elegance, with love and for love. Never tire of loving, no matter what happens. Our life on earth is a bad night in a bad inn, but all unpleasant things happen; what remains is the love of God.

Pain does not sanctify those who suffer in this life because of their wounded pride, envy, or jealousy. How much suffering we have made of ourselves! That cross is not that of Jesus, but arises precisely because we are far from Him. We must receive daily mishaps with great courage, offering them to the Lord in a spirit of reparation: without complaining, because complaint often indicates the rejection of the Cross. My children,” our Father once said, “embrace your little crosses; for when you love them, they will not weigh you down. And then you will have joy (…). Do not leave Christ alone. Stretch out your arms and say: here I am too, with the gesture of a priest, without tragedy!

My children, now, at the end of your prayer, ask Our Lady that we may know how to lovingly hold the Cross of her Son in our lives; that we may know, my Mother, to stretch out our arms on the Cross; that we may know how to embrace the Cross and love Christ in it serenely.