Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
I am a cradle Catholic. I was twenty, and about two-and-a-half years in the seminary, when I had my first deep spiritual experience. I made a good confession, I resolved to spend time in prayer each day, and also make some serious life-changes. Because I felt close to God, and because I was earnest about living my new life, I expected life to get a lot easier. The opposite happened. I lost some friends and I found my new existence to be a struggle. Like me, most people who newly become Christians or have had a conversion experience, expect life to get easier. They expect temptations to go away, their prayer to be answered easily and their strained relationships to get smooth. Their rational is very logical. As they move closer to God, and as they embrace holiness, they expect a turn around. The expectation makes perfect sense. If you take medication for an ailment and do everything the doctor asks you to do, you are supposed to get better. In spiritual life, often, the opposite happens. Life actually becomes harder. It is counterintuitive, but this is exactly what happens.
In my three points today, I would like to reflect on today's scripture readings and understand our spiritual struggles as we navigate through life.
Here are my three points.
- Why Spiritual Struggles? If we remember last Sunday’s gospel reading, Peter had just confessed that Jesus is the Christ. Based on his response, Christ entrusted to him the keys of the Kingdom. What did Peter expect after that? He expected life to become easier. Instead, Jesus begins to talk about his own suffering and death. Peter simply could not understand the contradiction. In fact, he took Jesus aside to counsel him. The same Peter who was complimented by Jesus ends up being rebuked.“Get behind me Satan,” Jesus said to him. Jesus never gave false expectations to his followers. He never said, “Follow me, and life will be good again!” The opposite is true. He said,"Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. But, why should it be this way? The reason is simple. Conversion or spiritual life becomes an intense struggle, because when we get close to God, we have to make choices different from our choices we may have made thus far. It is not God who has changed, but we have. It is not that God has abandoned us but we who have abandoned the old life-style. In many instances, we are dealing with changing years of habit.The closer we get to holiness, the more we become aware of our sins and our weaknesses. The closer to the light, the more we become aware of the darkness within. Often we lose friends because our conversion changes the terms of our friendships. Here is my basic insight for you today - if you are struggling because you are trying to live a good, holy, righteous, just and peaceful life, then you are doing something right. In fact, it is a life without struggles that we have to question.
- Spiritual Disillusionment? Sometimes, though, the issue is deeper than spiritual struggles. Sometimes, we are in a crisis of faith. I am very happy that passages like today’s first reading from Jeremiah did get recorded in scripture. They tells us that faith-crisis or spiritual disillusionment is real. Jeremiah was called by God when he was very young. He had protested his call but God prevailed over him. Since he was doing God’s work he expected everything to go right. It did not. He was severely persecuted for preaching the very message that God asked him to preach. We hear his disillusionment in today’s first reading: “You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped.” What shall we make of all this? Have you ever been angry with God? Have you felt let down by God? Have you felt cheated by God? And have you felt guilty about your feelings? If you are one of these people, please know that you are not alone. Jeremiah’s story teaches us that it is not wrong to feel spiritually disillusioned. However, we must also remember that how Jeremiah’s feelings of disillusionment ends. It ends by Jeremiah confessing the very God he felt disillusioned by. This precisely for us is the key - in moments of faith-crisis we must remember the larger story - that it is God who created us; that it is God who has already redeemed us; that it is God who makes eternity possible for us. We can overcome our faith-crisis as long we do not completely lose sight of the ultimate goodness of God.
- The Importance of Faith Confession. Jeremiah overcomes his disillusionment by his innermost conviction about God and about his call. He says, “I say to myself, I will not mention him [God], I will speak in his [God’s] name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; Last week, we heard Peter confess to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the son of the Living God.” Peter’s faith confession never abandoned him. He may have been rebuked by Christ, he may have denied Christ, but at the end, he remained faithful to his faith-confession. Ultimately, he embraced martyrdom. You and I know that God does not intentionally make life hard for anybody. That, in, fact would be ungodly. The real issue is that making upright, just, honest, and holy choices is harder than taking the easy way out. The best way to deal with life as it confronts us is to have a strong faith-confession. In moments of spiritual struggles or in times of spiritual disillusionment, it must be to our faith-confession that we return. It is more than thirty years since I had my initial spiritual experience. Even today, in moments of doubts, it is to that experience that I return. No matter how bad things get, I know, God is with me.
As we encounter Jesus in this Eucharist, let us bring our mind, our hearts and indeed our whole lives before God. May Christ give us the strength to take up our cross and follow him.
- Fr. Satish Joseph