Father Thomas Welbers' Homily

Almost exactly one week ago, late Christmas afternoon our time, while we were busily and peacefully celebrating the birth of Jesus with our families and friends, we were completely unaware of the tragedy that was unfolding half a world away. The count of lives quickly snuffed out is rapidly approaching 150,000, with more than five million homeless -- many of them orphaned. Everything needed to sustain their lives – food, clothing, shelter – completely destroyed. And the ravages of disease and hunger are just beginning to be felt, likely to bring the death toll to a quarter of a million, or perhaps many more. Worldwide relief efforts have been quick and massive and generous – nearly two billion dollars worth sofar, according to this morning's paper, and are continuing – but they are never enough. Any and all relief, as important and necessary as it is, never does more than just touch the surface of such a tragedy. The fractured and irreparable heart of immense suffering always remains.

As Christians, enlivened and enlightened by faith, we still ask why. If God is all powerful, why doesn’t he protect his children from such needless and tragic suffering and death? As Christians, we’ve heard many answers to this question, probably even given our own answers in an effort to comfort people grieving tragedy and loss. All the answers we may give, whether they focus on the fallibility, uncertainty and sinfulness of our human condition, or on our failures to harmonize our lives with the laws of nature, or even on the call to follow Jesus in carrying his cross – all these answers fall short of satisfying our need to make some sense of such suffering and tragedy.

The problem of pain and death, especially of children and innocents, has caused many to lose their faith and to deny that there is ultimately any meaning or hope to life. Others can rationalize such pain and tragedy in the abstract, without having experienced it, and then come to a whole different understanding when great pain and loss actually does become part of their own life.

Most of our faith-based attempts to reconcile a good and loving God with the great evils and tragedies of life have a ring of truth about them. They may make sense intellectually, and help us to keep faith in the ultimate goal and meaning of life beyond the confusion and uncertainty of our present experience. But our heart, our gut, still isn’t satisfied, is it? How can we still believe in a good God?

For most of us, our experience of suffering remains detached, vicarious, “it happens to somebody else,” it's seen on the evening news? Even then we are both repelled and spellbound by the images of human suffering. Whether close to the surface or deep down and repressed, we experience that unanswerable fear, “Can it happen to me and those I love?”

We fear pain and death, but even more deeply we fear losing control of our world. These experiences of tragedy and suffering remind us of our limited place in this world. Any attempt to fully manage them, especially with words, becomes an impossible task as we try, through our own efforts, to find meaning. Ultimately, our own efforts to the find meaning fail. We simply must live through it. Ultimately, God is the Creator of our world. We are not.

In a strange and ironic way the problem of pain and suffering shows us that God is beyond whatever we can imagine or construct. God is not a God we can define or cmoprehend, much less manipulate or control. We do not begin to understand the ultimate meaning of our condition in this world any more than we can understand the depths of the reality of God. And we kid ourselves when we think we do.

And so try as we can – and it is necessary that we try – we cannot fully or even satisfactorily understand the problem of pain or the death of an innocent – or of countless numbers of innocents. We do not have God’s eyes.

How can we worship such a God? It seems many people can’t. Just as many people turned their backs on Jesus when he spoke the “hard saying” about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Jesus did not run after them saying, “Wait, you misunderstood. I can explain.” Instead he turned to the remaining disciples, and asked, “Will you too go away?” Peter, speaking for the others said simply, “Lord, to whom shall we go? We have come to believe that you have the words of eternal life.” They didn’t understand either, but they could find no alternative. Today, confronted with a God and a world that we cannot understand, many turn away; and we who remain can only say with Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” (John 6:60ff)

The Gospel we just heard, as well as the feast we celebrate today, recalls the wonderful, surprising homage paid to the infant Jesus by strange visitors from a foreign land, at the same time that the king of his own people was plotting to kill Jesus. We know that this event caused both the hardship of Mary and Joseph fleeing with Jesus to Egypt, to become homeless refugees in a strange land for their very survival. And the same event also occasioned the mindless and merciless slaughter by the king’s henchmen of all the baby boys in the area around Bethlehem. Unspeakable tragedy marked Jesus’ life right from the start.

St. Luke’s Gospel says, concerning the events that surrounded the birth of Jesus, that “Mary pondered these things in her heart.” (Luke 2:19 -- see NRSV for a better translation) “Pondering” means more than merely “thinking about” or “reflecting.” The word “ponder” comes from a Latin word meaning “weight” as in “pound” or “ponderous.” To ponder is carry a weight – not necessarily to understand it, just to accept it, and carry it. The sublime yet confusing events of the divine drama Mary was just beginning to experience – her task was not to understand, but to accept and carry in her heart. And the weight would not be made lighter when at the foot of the cross, she would hear her divine Son cry out, with one breath “My God, why have you forsaken me!” and with another, final, breath “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

At this very murky dawn of the New Year, already burdened by unspeakable tragedy, we ponder with Mary a weight of human suffering we do not and cannot understand. Surrounded by tragedy and violence wherever we turn, we are speechless, and dogged by despair and fear. Is there hope?

The one glimmer of hope is the Jesus who stands beside us, who holds out his wounded hands and feet and pierced side for us to ponder, and who says only “Fear not. I have been there before you.” Is that enough for us?

© 2005 Thomas Welbers

This idea of "ponder" as "carrying tension so as to transform it" is a wonderful insight from Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI. See his articles, "When Doing Nothing Is Enough" , "Amazement as Blocking Compassion" , "A Culture of Amazement" , and "On Carrying a Scandal Biblically."