This Sermon is prepared by
Rev.Fr.Peter Jayakanthan sss
Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament
Corpus Christi Catholic Church,
Houston, Texas, US
05th Sunday of Ordinary YearWhy to me? - A God-Talk………!Job 7:1-4, 6-7 1Cor 9:16-19, 22-23 Mk 1:29-39Dear Sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus, we shall welcome each other as we enter into the Eucharistic celebration. Our gathering is a testimony and our community participation is a witness to people around us. The real tests is when we go out of the church and live our day to day realities of life…especially the unexplainable pain and sufferings of humanity that are the challenging moments to our faith and trust in God. We cannot run away from this. Every Eucharist reminds us to be in touch with our brokenness and identify with the brokenness of Jesus. We shall thank God who constantly participates in our life and that this Eucharistic sacrifice may lead us to share and shoulder the sufferings of our brothers and sisters.Mrs. Jennifer was listening to Sunday’s homily from the pastor who was preaching on Peter’s mother-in-law who was ill with a fever. She found it boring, so she left the church after the homily and decided to go out of city to a church where she had grown up; to her bad luck, her pastor came to substitute for the priest there, and again spoke about Peter’s wife’s mother who was down with a fever. Jennifer was unfulfilled, so she found time in the evening to go to the nearby hospital for Mass. As we can guess her pastor was assigned to the hospital Mass that day spoke again about Peter’s mother-in-law ill with fever. The next morning, Jennifer was on a bus riding downtown and, wonder of wonders, her pastor boarded that bus and sat down beside her. An ambulance raced by with sirens roaring. In order to make conversation, the pastor said, "Well, I wonder who it is?" "It must certainly be Peter's mother-in-law," she replied. "she was sick all day yesterday." We tend to run away from our sickness and sufferings. Some do not want to hear about pain, suffering and sickness. What is the common phrase we use during such moments? I can’t handle it more, I cannot handle any more surgeries, I cannot handle more loss, I am scared to handle my terminal situation, and I have no energy to take anything more. As we have this stress and struggle the only question we keep asking is, why? Why to me? Why to my family? Why does God allow this and permit that? “Why did God allow this to happen to me”? This was the question asked to me by a young mother a few years ago. I was called to a C-section for a young mother who wanted to meet me. She shared that she was carrying twins, lost one baby at 17weeks, and now the other, unborn at 23weeks, and did not survive. She asked, “tell me Father, knowing that both of my babies would not survive, why did God allow this to happen to me?’’ I remained with her in silence for 40 minutes, I could not answer, I don’t have answer…no one has an answer. There is no answer and no one can give a comforting or convincing answer. Instead of hiding, suppressing and running away, we are called to express, cry out and lament to God. It is ok to ask why; it is 100% good and fitting to ask why this happened to me? One of the greatest theologians Gutierrez Gustavo calls this natural and needed experience as “God-Talk”, it is our talk to Him, our personal talk to Him. We have given that privilege to express to Him. Gutierrez sees the lament of Job as God-Talk. We are aware and familiar with the first reading from the book and life of Job. It gives the wrestling of Job; it expresses the theological, spiritual and physical problem of suffering. Nowhere in Bible, or in any literature, is pain and suffering so powerfully shown, other than Job. Today’s text gives us the lament and cry of Job before the Lord. Job the wealthiest man, loses his wife, loses his children, and loses all his wealth and possessions. His friends left him because of the wounds on his body, an unnamed dreadful disease. His wife and friends forced him to deny God. So, in the state of isolation, depression and spiritual crisis, he expresses his inner cry to the Lord. How deep was his lament and pain? How hard were his suffering and depression? It is revealed in his words. He says his life is drudgery. How are we to understand this? Drudgery is being a slave looking for the freedom of shade, a bonded labor waiting for wages, and a force for routine military duty. These people were not sure of their end, future or freedom. Their life is filled with routine suffering called drudgery. Job says, ‘it keeps him awake at night without sleep’; when he expresses that the night is ‘dragging on,’ that reveals that he is in total darkness. There is no chance for light, dawn or hope.’ We cannot forget the cry and lament of Jesus at Gethsemane, “let this cup pass away from me”; and on the cross, “my God, My God why have you forsaken me? Jesus lamented before the Father. We all have our emotional, spiritual, physical and psychological struggle; it may be a combination of a few as well. We, too, join with Job asking God, ‘why? Why to me? Why do you allow this for me?’ We have the right to ask; we need to cry out and lament…this is God-Talk. The next step Job wants us to move is from why, to how? How can I go through this? How can I experience you, or see you in my loss and pain? At the end of the Book of Job, we find him talking with God, saying: “I have heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eyes have seen you.” After listening to the question of God, ‘were you there?’ ‘Were you there?’ Job experiences the close participation of God in all his suffering. It was not possible to go through that drudgery on his own, without Yahweh. The Gospel shows how Jesus participated in the life of the people. He went around and identified with people of all illness. People came from all places because of Jesus’ solidarity with them. Jesus humbled Himself to be born like us, taking on agony, pain and suffering; He identified with us. His solidarity with suffering reveals how He enters into our moments of struggle. The Early Church Fathers faced persecutions and sufferings with these words, “For I wished that His pains might be my pains, with compassion which would lead to longing for God.” (p.145) Ignatius of Antioch writes to the community about his way to martyrdom, in these words, “Let me imitate the passion of my God.” We come to Eucharistic altar to offer our struggles and pains and to recognize the suffering and redeeming Jesus in all those moments. Our brokenness is revealed, when the bread is broken and cup is poured. Bread is made from the grinding of wheat, and the wine is formed from smashing the grapes. So our sorrows and cries are grounded and crushed on this Altar, along with Jesus’ Body. The image of The Cross reflects so many countless crosses of burden, cruelty, violence and injustice; the world bears images of the struggles of people in the Gulag concentration camps, humiliations at Auschwitz, and victims of struggle in Latin America and the Middle East. The voices of Christian discipleship, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero and John Sobrino, whose cry for social justice reaches heaven, confirm that only in our own suffering can God help us to see His disfigured face in the poor. Moltmann a renowned theologian in his book The Crucified God asks, “Where are you, God?” He still asks that question, keeping his memory of the horror of July, 17, 1943, when the British Royal Air Force operations killed 40,000 people in his hometown of Hamburg, including the friend who was right next to him. Since then, his constant questions were, “Why I am not dead? Why did God allow me to survive until now”? There may be a reason, and Moltmann still continues to explore it, but only God alone knows. Moltmann states that wrestling with God is not only his problem in post-war and post-Auschwitz Germany, but it is the struggle of all times and places. He still does not know why he was spared, but he clearly says that God is with us. He is among us, participating, sharing and accompanying us in our suffering. During the 40 minutes I was present to the young mother who asked me, ‘why would God allow this’, while holding the hands of her husband, came to acceptance of the cross she was bearing: “My God knows me; I can go through this with my husband’s support, my God will lift me up from this loss and sadness, my problem is smaller than those who around me, my God knows my limit.” In offering our sufferings, trials, pains, and being in solidarity with all those who suffer in the world, and placing them on the Altar to be ground and crushed in the Eucharistic sacrifice, the solidarity of God will make our journey possible, “even if I walk in the valley of darkness, I fear no harm for you are at my side”Psalm23:4-Amen. 
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