Homily
for the
29th
Sunday of Ordinary Time
[October 18, 2015]
Isaiah 53: 10-11
I expected to be with my Scout troop this entire weekend, but their plans went awry and we were compelled to return home on Saturday afternoon. So no Sunday homily for me. What follows, then, is a really old one--actually one prepared for a homiletics class in seminary!
“Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him: he has put him to grief.”
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On Oct. 24, 1976, the Coast Guard located a small orange
raft bobbing in the Pacific. They’d been
hunting for it for over 30,000 square miles of water. In the raft lay Bruce Collins, the hungry and
dehydrated survivor of a shipwreck 28 days earlier. We may well imagine the anguish the Collins
family during those 4 weeks.
Such anguish is trial enough. Unfortunately, it’s not the entire tragedy. For there had been 3 young people in that
raft when their ketch sank in a storm.
Two of them were buried at sea a week before rescue came for Bruce.
Why? What did these
young sailors do to deserve that kind of physical and mental suffering? What did their parents do? Why do the innocent
suffer? These are questions no one has
ever been able to answer with much satisfaction. They are questions the prophet Isaiah is
concerned with today. The first reading
speaks of the Lord’s Servant undergoing undeserved punishment. This punishment acts as an atoning sacrifice
for a multitude of sinners who probably were more deserving of punishment.
We don’t know who this unnamed Servant is. The passage seems to reflect Abraham’s story. Who was more righteous than this Hebrew
patriarch? He was righteous by virtue of
his supreme faith in God, and this faith of Abraham’s justified many nations (Rom
4:3,11,17-18; Gen 15:16; 17:5).
Abraham’s faith had to undergo a grievous test. He believed God was commanding him to offer
his only son in sacrifice. He was ready
to do so; still believing God would keep his promise. Losing a son or daughter, as those families
did when a sailboat sank in the Pacific, is painful. What did Abraham suffer as he prepared to sacrifice his own
Isaac? God let him know, of course, that
he desired not Isaac’s death, but Abraham’s complete faith. Because he believed, Abraham saw his offspring
and prospered.
That offspring was Israel, who could also be the Suffering
Servant of our passage. It is true that
a good deal of what Israel
suffered at the hands of the Gentiles was well deserved. The prophets of the Old Testament make that
clear. But Isaiah seems to say Israel has
gotten more than she has earned. She is
still the Lord’s chosen one, his servant. We are well aware that after this
passage was composed at the end of the Babylonian Exile, about 540 years before
Christ, Israel
has much suffering ahead of her despite and often because of her fidelity to
the covenant God made with her. What
value did such suffering have? If we
believe God’s word spoken here thru Isaiah, like Abraham’s anguish Israel’s pains
have justified many sinners. She has
been the innocent lamb offered in sacrificial atonement for the sins of mankind
(Lev 5). At the same time she has come
to understand better her prophetic role in history. This is, in fact, a recurrent theme in Jewish
literature. Suffering, if we let is be,
can be the means in which we become open to the will of the Lord which is
bruising us or others. It makes us
realize how insignificant we are and, paradoxically, how noble we can be, like
the martyrs of Judaism and Christianity, or just on the human level, like
baseball’s Lou Gehrig in the face of lateral sclerosis. Bruce Collins did, in fact, admit having a
religious experience during those 28 days adrift. The good in what is painful comes only when
we open ourselves to suffering atonement, atonement that is either personal or
universal.
We can get still more radical. Acceptance of imposed
suffering isn’t easy, but we don’t have a whole lot of choice about enduring
it. Yet we find men and women who
deliberately choose the way of atonement: St. Therese suffering in her French convent
that God might convert far-away pagans; Albert Schweitzer abandoning a
successful scholarly career that he might bring medicine to black Africa and atone for his fellow Europeans’ mistreatment
of them.[1]
And we see the greatest example of suffering atonement in him
whom the Church has for 2,000 years seen as the Suffering Servant—Jesus
Christ. In the gospels we see him ever
submissive to his Father’s will, quite aware that he is cast in a role which
involves suffering and death (cf. Phil 2:8).
His sin offering was such a total submission to the divine will that it
has atoned for the wicked rebellion of all of us and made us righteous. And certainly it is we who deserve the
suffering, not Jesus. Because he obeyed,
he has been raised up and sees the fruit of his travail: the Church born from his pierced heart, as the
Fathers of the Church have put it.
No, neither Abraham nor Israel, neither Jesus nor the
saints explain why you and I suffer.
There is no apparent reasoning behind our fates. Neither the wisdom writers of the Old Testament
nor the philosophers of all ages have found a reason either. We can discover but two things: what the reading told us in the first line: “It was the will of the Lord to bruise him,”
and what Paul tells us, that we share in Christ’s suffering now and in his
glory later. The Lord’s will is a loving
will, and he has his own loving reasons for permitting evil, which includes
suffering. We sometimes see the love in
retrospect, like children who’ve grown up.
At other times we’ll only grasp the full breadth, length, height, and
depth of that love (cf. Eph 3:18-19) when we’ve been raised up with Jesus.
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