Pain. Suffering. Jeremiah speaks in the first reading this morning about how difficult that can be. All of us have gone through some sort of trauma. Some difficult times. Some of us have experienced a loss that has pierced us to the core of our very soul itself. Jeremiah seems to have hit rock bottom and is calling out to God. Doubting. Wondering. Asking why God? Why won’t the pain let up? Why me? He sits there with this harrowing condition that never goes away, a continuous pain, an incurable wound. As a man who has experienced chronic pain for decades, this reading speaks to me. But I don’t think just to me. Each one of us this morning probably has something they are dealing with, some loss, some ache, whether one of the body or the heart.
This last sentence reminds us of the solution to all of it though. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail, For I am with you, to deliver and rescue you, says the LORD. God reminds us in the scriptures this morning that He Himself took on flesh. He became man. Jesus Christ on the cross gave suffering value. Not because God had to suffer, but because suffering is part of what it means to be human. When God was incarnated as man, He gave us a way to emulate Him, even in our loss. Even in our pain. Because when we experience the human condition, when we experience those things that are not so pleasant, we know that by turning to God and trusting in Him, we too are offering our pain to and with Christ.
How beautiful is that? It’s not that God wants us to suffer. He doesn’t desire us to be miserable and in pain. But when we do suffer, He has given us a path that allows us to draw closer to Jesus on the cross. To become more like Him, even when we are just being human. Because we don’t know what it is like to be divine, we know exactly what it is like to be human. To be frail and in pain. To have difficulty understanding the darkness of the world we live in and the struggles that we so wish we didn’t have to go through. And so today I think our meditation should simply be to rest in the silence of whatever we are going through and pray those words: “Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail, For I am with you, to deliver and rescue you, says the LORD.”
A homily for Wednesday of the Seventeenth week in Ordinary Time: July 27th, 2022