A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (John 16: 20-23a) snatches us from the
ecstasy of yesterday’s feast of the Ascension and brings us back down to earth
with a stark warning from Jesus during his discourse after the Last Supper: Truly,
truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. The
comfort will come, He tells the Apostles, but it will not come quickly. You
will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. This is in fact the
essence of this scriptural extract: first the pain, later the reward, just as
in the pangs of childbirth. Thus far the words of today’s holy gospel.
This gospel message is challenging for us for perhaps two reasons.
First, it reminds us of that perennial truth of Christianity: first the fast,
then the feast. The ways of the world put these realities in the reverse order:
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you will die. In contrast, Christianity
tells us: die to yourself today to live to Christ tomorrow. First, our Good
Friday, then our Easter Sunday. The
challenge here for us is the deferral of satisfaction and pleasure, the
avoidance of pain and sorrow. Right now, however, because of our call to follow
Him, there is a test to be faced, a burden to be carried, or let us simply call
it our cross. It is rather as the words of Sirach remind us: My child, when
you enter the service of the Lord, prepare yourself for tribulation. We
were baptised in the name of a Man God nailed to the most feared instrument of
torture in the Roman world: why on earth do we struggle to bear in mind the
implications of this fact?
There is an answer to that conundrum but let us consider now
the second reason that we find this fast-first message of Christianity
challenging: it asks us to counteract our natural human instinct to want to
harmonise ourselves emotionally with our fellow humans wedded to the
feast-first philosophy. As we noted on Monday, our taste for cordiality can be
misleading. What is there to worry about, the world asks us. The world often
hates Christian values, but it hates even more our failure to share its sympathies
and rejoice in its Ode to Joy. But that is because its joys are only
sometimes those of the Christians. As Jesus foretells it: Truly, truly, I
say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. We have
to face this separation. We are no longer running with the herd.
There is a balance to be struck here. I can share my atheist
neighbour’s joy in the sound of children playing. On the other hand, I simply
cannot share his joy at successfully hiding his adultery from his wife. We are
caught here on the horns of a dilemma: fail to rejoice in his vice and risk
being thought po-faced, or accompany him in his joyful debauchery because – you
know, even adultery has a shadow of love and adventure about it – but then find
ourselves oddly isolated from the Lord in a place we can no longer call home.
Where then is the true joy and where the true cause for lament?
So, why do we struggle to bear in mind the implications of
the cross? Why do we find the calls of the world for fellow sympathy to be so
strong? Each and every one of us must face this question and grapple with our
own answer. Is it a lack of conversion on our part, the failure to cast our
eyes habitually on the cross at the start of our day to remind ourselves of the
desperate measures that our actions have called forth from our Redeemer? Is it
too little readiness for self-denial, a commitment only to the bare minimum,
leaving us dangerously within the gravitational orbit of weaknesses that are excusable
but the gateway to greater betrayals? Do we resist the lamentation that must
perforce arise from putting to death not only our vices but our self-oriented
search for gratification even within our religion? Are we too often the dupe of
an all-too-human readiness for self-congratulation?
But perhaps we cannot give a just answer to such questions
without having first considered the true measure of all joy and lamentation:
the fiat in joy and the fiat in sorrow to which our charism in COLW invites us.
Joy and sorrow are themselves human passions, known to almost all members of
the human race. Within God’s plan, however, they must be understood in relation
to the gifts of God that have transformed our human destiny. Humanity is
fallen: this is only a tragedy if we consider peace with God as the very
purpose of our existence. At that point, every step closer to that peace is
paradoxically a reason for joy, even if that step involves our sorrow and
lamentations. Conversely, if God is the very purpose of our existence, every step
away from eternal joy is a cause for sorrow, even if the short-term reward is a
wayward pleasure or indulgence.
If then we say yes to lamentation in the name of Christ, we
are in fact celebrating joy in the long run, a joy that is unending and that
nobody may take from us. This passage should send us back to a much earlier one
in the gospels of St Matthew and St Mark:
And Jesus said to them, ‘The
wedding-guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?
The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they
will fast.
But here we see again the paradox, not only of Christian
sorrow and joy, but also of Jesus’ presence and absence. For the Apostles must
fast when He leaves them; fast in the concrete sense of undergoing penance, as
well as in the metaphorical sense of bearing with being deprived of His
presence. Yet at the same time, He will assure them: Behold I am with you
always, even to the end of the world, absent and yet present, near but yet
far, distant and still intimately with us. We can no more separate joy and
sorrow in a Christian sense than we can separate this paradox of His presence
and His absence. There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday, but Good Friday
has no purpose without an Easter Sunday.
Sorrow minus Christian joy turns us into po-faced sourpusses,
governed by the logic of perfection rather than union with God, the Eternally
Joyful One. Joy minus Christian sorrow leaves us bland and tasteless, unable to
stand for anything that requires our resistance: the 0% salt of the compromised
Christian. We must hold this paradox of joy and sorrow together, as did Mary
our mother and our model, a heart pieced with the swords of loss and compassion
whose joys were, nevertheless, so exquisite she dwelt on them all her days. When
we behold Him like Mary did, we will ask nothing more of Him for to behold Him
is to be joyful forever.
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