We cannot watch a television show, check out the news on the internet, or read a newspaper without being saturated with reports of people who are suffering in many, many ways. Some are starving from poverty – 15% in our nation, it has been recently reported, live in poverty in the United States. We are told that 22.2% of children in Monroe County live in poverty. Some are suffering from the violence in Palestine and Israel…. or in Ukraine or the tribal wars in Africa. Many of us have friends who have lost homes because they no longer can make their monthly mortgage payments, some losing both their jobs and their homes at the same time.
We hear this weekend about terrible losses suffered by the enigmatic Hebrew Scripture figure, Job. Job lost everything… to an almost unimaginable extent. Even his wife and friends turned on him. At the end of the scripture passage we hear Job bemoan: “I shall not see happiness again.” There might be many, even here today, who would like to or have said the same thing.
Immediately after the “Our Father” at Mass, the priest says a special prayer for peace. He asks the Lord to deliver us from every evil and to graciously grant peace in our days. He goes on to ask that we might be safe from all distress as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
We come to the realization that God does not want us to suffer. He wants to deliver us from suffering. God does not inflict pain; he heals.
Jesus Christ reveals a God who comes, not to condemn us but to save us; to heal us of our infirmities and to deliver us from evil. He wants to deliver us from evil, not inflict it on us. The poet Hafiz, authored a poem nearly seven hundred years ago, “We should Talk About This Problem.” In it, God addresses a wounded soul:
There is a Beautiful Creature
Living in a hole you have dug…
And I often sing, but still, my dear,
You do not come out.
I have fallen in love with Someone
Who hides inside of you.
God, as Jesus assures us, has a special affection for those of us who are too bruised and wounded to be touched. Jesus assures us too that God’s love can go through locked doors and into broken places and free up what’s paralyzed and help that which can no longer help itself. God is not blocked when we are, God can reach through.
Deliver us, Lord, we pray, as we wait in joyful hope all the while working with God to overcome all that would tear away our happiness.