5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Brendan

Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time
February 5, 2006
Cycle B

I want to begin this reflection with a brief calendar item. I think that February is the most dismal month of the year followed closely by January and March in that order. Some of you may share my feelings on this matter. But even if you do not, I take a certain amount of comfort in the knowledge that the ancient Romans, where were in large part responsible for our calendar, considered February to be an unlucky month which is why it is also the shortest month.

Originally, the Roman calendar had only 10 months beginning in March and ending in December. The period between December and March was simply disregarded as of little importance because nothing happened in those cold, dark, slumbering 60 days which we have come to call January and February. This is why January and February were the last months to be added to the calendar.

Given the reputation of this month it is somewhat appropriate that the Book of Job ushers in February with one of its rare appearances. It suggests to me that the members of the Pontifical Liturgical Commission (who chose the readings for the three year cycle) may actually have picked this reading out of something that approximates a sense of humor.
“Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?
Months of misery and troubled nights have been allotted to
me.”
So says Job. In speaking of months of misery does he have January and February in mind? Probably. Though he is also speaking out of a larger context in which the experience of this month only plays a small part: that is the mystery of human suffering, and to be more precise, the mystery of undeserved human suffering. Of this, of Job is surely the prime example.

Throughout the Old Testament there is a sense that if you serve God faithfully and keep all his commands things will go well with you: corn, wine and oil, long life and plenty will be yours: whereas disease, suffering, poverty and a violent death are the lot of the sinner.
By the time of Christ this idea of blessings for faithfulness and curses for sinfulness was firmly fixed in Jewish mind. You can see an example of it in John’s Gospel when the apostles, noticing a blind man sitting outside the temple, ask Jesus if it was his sin or his parents that caused him to be born blind. The blind, the lame, the leprous and diseased are all being deservedly punished for things done or left undone.

I said that this idea was a common one in the Old Testament. But the Book of Job proves to be the exception to the rule. Job is a righteous man: his sufferings are completely unmerited and undeserved. His misfortune is actually due to a wager between God and Satan to see if Job, who up until now has enjoyed God’s favor and protection will, when faced with the loss of everything he holds dear, curse God to his face.

The brief passage from today’s liturgy comes from the seventh chapter where Job is visited by his three troublesome friends who have ostensibly come to comfort him. Since suffering is a punishment for sin they feel certain that Job must have done something wrong to merit all this misfortune. Job can only protest his innocence and the apparent futility of the human condition in the face of suffering and death. But since God is just it must somehow add up to something.

Most people are quite happy to suffer in silence, if they’re sure everybody knows about. The Book of Job, capitalizing on this bit of truth, seems to be saying that there is at least someone who needs to know what suffering is all about and that someone is God. This is why you get the sense that Job, while patiently enduring all that is dished out to him, is really pointing a finger at God and saying: you don’t know what it means to suffer, to feel pain, and to die. What is more, Job is right. God by definition is beyond sickness, suffering and death.
One of my theology teachers liked to say that Job provokes God into coming up with an answer to the charge that he is a stranger to all that is human and weak. And the answer is the Incarnation of Christ. And this in fact how we are meant to understand the passage from today’s Gospel. Jesus is God’s personal response to the human condition and all that it entails.
Mark shows this in a dramatic way. He has Jesus work his miracles on a Sabbath which in effect says that this is the beginning of a new age, a new Creation. Jesus also rejects any taboo that might inhibit his ability to help those in need. He reaches out and touches Simon’s mother-in-law. A respected rabbi of Jesus day would not have taken a woman by the hand, and certainly not on a Sabbath day. Christ’s approach to this woman, and all who are sick or possessed, is Mark’s way of signaling God’s compassion.

This may not strike you as a big deal. After all, every religion has, in some way, an answer to the problem of suffering and evil. Some faiths, like Christian Science, deny the reality of the physical universe and pretend that disease and death are an illusion. Some faiths comfort the suffering by asserting that God is tormenting them for their own good, to make them better persons. And others maintain that God has nothing to do with suffering because he stands above it.

It is true that God does not want human misery. But that does not mean that he has nothing to do with it. In fact, if we take today’s Gospel as our guide, we see that God has in effect rolled up his sleeves and entered into it, is not afraid to get his hands dirty doing something about the human condition.

But as everyone knows its one thing to visit a hospital and another to be a patient: this explains why the Lord Jesus will go on to identify with suffering humanity in a far more dramatic and ultimately shocking way. On the Cross he will taste death itself and descend into the abyss of hell the ultimate place of human alienation and torment. There will be nothing held back from him in this, the ultimate lesson in what it means to be a human being.

Whenever we gather for Eucharist to eat and drink his flesh and blood we celebrate a wondrous exchange: we enter into the mystery of his passion and death and he enters into our own personal experience of suffering and death. But he brings with him more than empathy, he brings the power of his holy and life giving resurrection.

This is not the theological equivalent of an extra strength Tylenol. He does not take our suffering away, and we will all one day have to die. But his passion and death gives meaning to our own. And this is good news to keep in mind in these long, dark slumbering days of February.