Our God is With Us in Our Suffering

Homily for Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Once again, St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians brings up the issue of our participation in the resurrection through baptism. “You were raised with Christ and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

This provides a helpful framework for looking at the so familiar Beatitudes which we hear today in St. Luke’s Gospel. If we are poor and hungry, lacking many things necessary for good human life, still “the Kingdom of God” is ours; we are already sharing in the risen life of Christ. If we are sorrowing because of enduring disagreements in the family, because of pain and illness, or because of difficult financial circumstances, we can still have a deep-down confidence that God enables us to live through this. If our faith makes others ignore us or consider us out of touch or even attack us, this is all a sharing in the cross of Christ which always precedes a full resurrection. Being risen with Christ, in other words, is no simple cure-all for serious, even desperate human situations.

The Resurrection encourages us to hope and trust that God does not mean this desperate situation to be the end – that God can help us through this and even bring good from it. Faith in Christ and our share in his risen life do not take us out of the messiness or misery of ordinary human life. Rather, faith offers us a way to go through our difficulties with hope and strength.

Each time we share at this altar, we are reminded by the so-ordinary-looking signs of the presence of Christ that in the agony, discouragement, and hard work of daily life, our God is with us.