17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072725.cfm
Two weeks ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Poland with a group of Catholic high school teachers. As part of that experience, we spent two days at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp at the center of the Holocaust that operated between May 1940 and January 1945. Auschwitz has become a byword for evil, and rightly so, it is the site of the worst atrocities of the 20th century (if not human history): 1.1 million people—Polish people, Soviet prisoners, Roma, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, criminals, and most especially Jews—lost their lives in the camps.
It is hard to grasp the intensity of “man’s inhumanity to man” at this place, and it is difficult to understand how God permits such awfulness to exist. In today’s 1st reading, we hear Abraham argue with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that story, God hears people crying out in anguish from those cities, saying, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down” and respond. After seeing that the peoples of those cities truly were wicked, the Lord rained down sulfur and fire from heaven upon them and devastated the entire plain with earthquakes.
If God interceded in such a decisive way in Genesis, we might ask why He did not burn Auschwitz, the Nazis and the SS up. And why He does not act again to right the horrors of the world today? We live in a world where the wicked often prosper and bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own.
Abraham challenged God with a haunting question, “should not the judge of all the earth act with justice?” Abraham knew, as we do, that God is good—indeed God is love itself—and that God is all powerful. Why, then, does He permit evil? How could it possibly serve the so-called greater good? This conundrum is what theologians and philosophers call “The Problem of Evil.”
The problem of evil is a problem because there are no good solutions to it. And our attempts answer the problem often end up creating bigger problems, sometimes by suggesting that God is an agent of evil, that God needs evil to create goodness, or that God is not really all powerful. These ‘solutions’ are simply wrong. Sometimes in our desire to comfort people who are suffering, we resort to platitudes like, “everything happens for a reason,” “God never gives you more than you can handle,” or “there’s a silver lining to every raincloud.” These well-worn sayings can actually cause more hurt than pain. Sometimes the best thing that we can do is to be present to the grieving and when we don’t know what to say, to simply remain silent.
In the Book of Job, after Job loses his children, his family, and his livelihood and is struck by a terrible, painful disease, three of his friends come to comfort him. For seven days, they sit with him on an ash heap and remain in silence. Again, at times, that is the most appropriate response. But after one week, the three friends begin to offer explanations for why Job is suffering. They blame him, the victim, for all that has befallen him. At the conclusion of the story, Job prays for his friends and God tells them, “you have not spoken rightly concerning me, as has my servant Job.”
As rational creatures, we try to make sense of evil, to explain why it happens. Yet, evil by its very nature makes no sense. It is the absence of reason and the rejection of God’s providence and plan. That is not to say that good cannot be brought from evil—it absolutely can—but evil is never good in itself.
We live in a fallen world where suffering and death continue to exist. It is a world crying out for redemption. Perhaps we might dare to say, as Job did sitting on his ash heap, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth, and I will see Him with my own eyes.”
For our Redeemer does truly live. God has seen the suffering of His people and come to redeem us by taking on the form of a human being. No longer appearing as an angry God throwing sulphur and fire and flood, but one of us.
Our cries to heaven move the heart of our compassionate God. It disturbs Him so greatly that He has become a human being to share in our pain and to suffer with us. We are not alone. As the name Emmanuel proclaims, God is with us. God has taken the evil of the world upon himself and nailed it to the cross. By dying, he has conquered death.
This is our faith. And yet, we know too that death and evil are still with us now, until the Lord comes again to remake heaven and earth and wipe away every tear.
In Auschwitz, I visited the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe was martyred and heard his remarkable story. A prisoner had apparently escaped, and the Nazis sentenced ten men to die as an example. A Polish priest, Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward to offer himself in place of another man who was married with children. The Nazis put him along with the nine others in dark basement cells to starve. In those cells, Kolbe led the prisoners in prayers and songs, comforted them and heard their confessions. After two weeks, the guards came to take his life. Kolbe told the doctor, “You have not understood anything about life. Hate is useless. Only love creates.” He died with the words, “Ave Maria,” Hail Mary on his lips.
As Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” I pray that St. Maximilian Kolbe’s example will inspire us to recognize that love truly is more powerful than hate, good is greater than evil, and that the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.
Cycle C
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072725.cfm
Two weeks ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Poland with a group of Catholic high school teachers. As part of that experience, we spent two days at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp at the center of the Holocaust that operated between May 1940 and January 1945. Auschwitz has become a byword for evil, and rightly so, it is the site of the worst atrocities of the 20th century (if not human history): 1.1 million people—Polish people, Soviet prisoners, Roma, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, criminals, and most especially Jews—lost their lives in the camps.
It is hard to grasp the intensity of “man’s inhumanity to man” at this place, and it is difficult to understand how God permits such awfulness to exist. In today’s 1st reading, we hear Abraham argue with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that story, God hears people crying out in anguish from those cities, saying, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down” and respond. After seeing that the peoples of those cities truly were wicked, the Lord rained down sulfur and fire from heaven upon them and devastated the entire plain with earthquakes.
If God interceded in such a decisive way in Genesis, we might ask why He did not burn Auschwitz, the Nazis and the SS up. And why He does not act again to right the horrors of the world today? We live in a world where the wicked often prosper and bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own.
Abraham challenged God with a haunting question, “should not the judge of all the earth act with justice?” Abraham knew, as we do, that God is good—indeed God is love itself—and that God is all powerful. Why, then, does He permit evil? How could it possibly serve the so-called greater good? This conundrum is what theologians and philosophers call “The Problem of Evil.”
The problem of evil is a problem because there are no good solutions to it. And our attempts answer the problem often end up creating bigger problems, sometimes by suggesting that God is an agent of evil, that God needs evil to create goodness, or that God is not really all powerful. These ‘solutions’ are simply wrong. Sometimes in our desire to comfort people who are suffering, we resort to platitudes like, “everything happens for a reason,” “God never gives you more than you can handle,” or “there’s a silver lining to every raincloud.” These well-worn sayings can actually cause more hurt than pain. Sometimes the best thing that we can do is to be present to the grieving and when we don’t know what to say, to simply remain silent.
In the Book of Job, after Job loses his children, his family, and his livelihood and is struck by a terrible, painful disease, three of his friends come to comfort him. For seven days, they sit with him on an ash heap and remain in silence. Again, at times, that is the most appropriate response. But after one week, the three friends begin to offer explanations for why Job is suffering. They blame him, the victim, for all that has befallen him. At the conclusion of the story, Job prays for his friends and God tells them, “you have not spoken rightly concerning me, as has my servant Job.”
As rational creatures, we try to make sense of evil, to explain why it happens. Yet, evil by its very nature makes no sense. It is the absence of reason and the rejection of God’s providence and plan. That is not to say that good cannot be brought from evil—it absolutely can—but evil is never good in itself.
We live in a fallen world where suffering and death continue to exist. It is a world crying out for redemption. Perhaps we might dare to say, as Job did sitting on his ash heap, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth, and I will see Him with my own eyes.”
For our Redeemer does truly live. God has seen the suffering of His people and come to redeem us by taking on the form of a human being. No longer appearing as an angry God throwing sulphur and fire and flood, but one of us.
Our cries to heaven move the heart of our compassionate God. It disturbs Him so greatly that He has become a human being to share in our pain and to suffer with us. We are not alone. As the name Emmanuel proclaims, God is with us. God has taken the evil of the world upon himself and nailed it to the cross. By dying, he has conquered death.
This is our faith. And yet, we know too that death and evil are still with us now, until the Lord comes again to remake heaven and earth and wipe away every tear.
In Auschwitz, I visited the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe was martyred and heard his remarkable story. A prisoner had apparently escaped, and the Nazis sentenced ten men to die as an example. A Polish priest, Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward to offer himself in place of another man who was married with children. The Nazis put him along with the nine others in dark basement cells to starve. In those cells, Kolbe led the prisoners in prayers and songs, comforted them and heard their confessions. After two weeks, the guards came to take his life. Kolbe told the doctor, “You have not understood anything about life. Hate is useless. Only love creates.” He died with the words, “Ave Maria,” Hail Mary on his lips.
As Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” I pray that St. Maximilian Kolbe’s example will inspire us to recognize that love truly is more powerful than hate, good is greater than evil, and that the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.
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