Pain With a Purpose

During the days of activism, there was a parable about a pig and a mother hen walking down the plaza. When they saw a billboard advertising ham and egg, the mother hen turned to the pig and said,  “See how we contribute to mankind providing them with good breakfast?” The pig reacted, “Ah, but there’s a big difference – yours is dedication., while mine is total commitment.”

If you don’t find today’s Gospel hard to swallow, you are not really listening.  Jesus is asking for total commitment of every Christian, as a disciple. Yes, you must be baptized, you must believe in Jesus, and you must live all the ten of the Commandments. But if you listen to St. Luke’s Jesus Christ seriously, you must add three very challenging conditions:  1) You have to hate your father and mother, your wife or husband, your children, your brothers and sisters, even your own life; 2) You have to carry whatever cross Christ or life lays on you – preferably with a smile; and 3) You have to give up every possession.

First, you cannot be a disciple of Jesus unless you hate – hate just about everybody you have good reason to love. If you take “hate” literally, there’s a problem indeed.  Elsewhere Jesus made it crystal clear that his followers may not hate anyone – and that includes the terrorists, the murderers and rapists, the corrupt officials, swindlers, slanderers, drug lords, and those who did not pay back their debts.

Jesus insisted that the second great commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself – no matter who the neighbor happens to be, whatever the color or class, religion, or sex. He declared, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” And the most difficult commandment of all: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love unto crucifixion.

Obviously, you cannot have it both ways: Love everybody and hate your family. What then? Look at the context. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, the road to death. Great crowds surround him, all sorts of people, many of them willing to join up with him but without appraising the cost. He wants them to think it over seriously.

“To be my disciple is unusually difficult. Absolutely nobody, absolutely nothing, comes before me. I am the Lord and Master.” In case of conflict, your nearest and dearest take second place.

 How do I know this is what Jesus meant? I turn to the corresponding text in Matthew.  There, Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” There, you have in simple language without exaggeration the first condition for a Christian: Jesus is number one in your life; no one, no matter how close to you in love, no one comes before him. 

What Jesus wants, Jesus gets.  Forget the word “hate”; the simple sentence is tough enough. Putting Jesus at the top of one’s love list had done over the centuries what Jesus predicted. It has all too often “set a man against his father, and daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.”

So the hard question: “Where does Christ rank in my day-to-day existence?” Not only in general, but when I have to choose between rival loves – Christ or money, Christ or power, Christ or popularity, Christ or sex, Christ or pleasure. But making Jesus my ‘number one’ is not enough. To be his disciple, to be a genuine Christian calls for a second condition: You have to carry a cross. Here you touch the very core of Christianity – the mystery of suffering. No human being escapes it – believer or atheist, Catholic or Buddhist, young or old, rich or poor.

And the forms the human cross takes are countless: the heartbreak over a dear one’s death, a terminal illness, a world war that took 50 million lives and the war in the womb that takes 50 million more each year. It’s all around us. It covers the newspapers each day. It’s part and parcel of human living. 

Like it or not, a cross is or will be part of your life. Your task and mine is to take the reality and transform it into Christian living. Keep suffering from degenerating into sheer waste. Integrate it into your life. Take the pain that seem so useless and senseless, so frustrating – and make it life-giving, even a source of profound joy.

Is this nonsense?  Not really, if God-made-man hung on a cross for three excruciating hours ‘till his heart gave out, then suffering has to have a profound place in the story of salvation – in our story.  It has to make sense, even if you and I are too earth-bound to see it.

But there is a little light.  Central to Christian suffering is a crucial sentence of St. Paul: “I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.”

Sheer pain is not a blessing; simply to take pleasure in pain makes one a candidate for masochists’ club. Behind Paul’s gospel of suffering is a profound realization: To make human or Christian sense, pain must have a purpose. Soldiers give their lives courageously… for their country. Mothers endure torment… for a child to be born. It is purpose that transforms sheer suffering into sacrifice. And the one purpose that overshadows all others is love.

Such was the driving force behind Jesus’ journey to the cross: “God so loved the world.”And all this, out of love for men and women most of whom do not know him, or know him and pass him by, or give him grudgingly an hour a week. So, for each one of us, Christ’s sacrifice – the self-giving that saves the world – is not yet finished. In God’s wisdom you and I have to take that cross to ourselves, carry it on our shoulders. And when we do, each time we murmur in the midst of any distress, “For you, Lord.”

Ready for the third condition? To follow Jesus, to be his disciple, you have to give up all you have. All of us?  Certainly sounds like it.

But the problem with each Sunday Gospel is that you get a little part, a segment out of a larger whole; the passage you hear is not the context. 

A Catholic priest was quoted as preaching, “To hell with the Catholic Church.” What was not quoted was this next sentence, “So say the enemies of the Church.” So here, where riches and possessions, are at stake, even Scripture scholars are puzzled over Luke. On the one hand you have the radical Jesus, who proclaims, “Woe to you who are rich…”

On the other hand, you have a moderate Jesus, who never tells his dear friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary to give up all they have. Which is the real Jesus? The radical Jesus stands before us as a constant challenge. We know from experience that a danger lurks in great possession, and power, and honor. They can dominate my existence, manipulate me. If it does, all else takes second place – including Christ. The radical Jesus poses a perennial question:  What rules my life?

The moderate Jesus turns our attention away from danger to opportunity – the potential of my possessions. Use them as Jesus invites and commands. To a few he may say, “Give all your worldly possessions to the poor and come, follow me in complete trust.” To most, “Share what you have; use it for your sisters and brothers. Use your intelligence to free enslaved minds, your power to produce peace, your compassion to heal fragmented hearts, your hope to destroy another’s despair, your love to make life livable for the unloved.”

My dear friends, today’s Gospel is hard and challenging, not the kind we like to hear. But still, it is the Gospel – literally “good news.” What’s so good about it? In answer, a critical question: How shall I live? Make sure that no person, however deeply loved, nothing however precious, takes the place Christ should occupy in your priorities.

Put every profit. Make it a saving grace for others by linking your cross to Calvary. Whatever your gifts, don’t hold on to them selfishly, share them – as Christ asks them of you. The result will surprise you, perhaps it already has. For when you live the way Jesus lived, you will feel the way Jesus felt.  And there’s nothing in the world like it.