“The lazy, crazy, hazy days of Summer 2024 will officially end next weekend. Looking back, we have our memories hopefully good and perhaps sadly bad. Among the latter that I have are those stories of drownings and shark attacks especially involving youngsters. But above all those others, the one that hit me the hardest as I sat down to write these words came the report back in June of a vacationing couple who were swept away by rip currents leaving behind six children. Do you remember it also? And what about those six sudden orphans? Pain and suffering clouds the summer sky.
The gospel today provides the context to consider the whole subject of human suffering, as Jesus brings up the subject with His chosen Twelve. It hovers over even the best of our days. Just as a hearse passing by a showy, red convertible drives home a point.
The bible tells us forthrightly that suffering entered our world with the arrival of sin. Sin as a deliberate selfish choice to make ourselves little gods in defiance of the One Great God of heaven and earth.
“We will decide what’s right and wrong; what’s best for us; what will make us happy, and You, O God, had best pay attention!” Oh, we never actually phrase it that way, much less say it out loud, but that’s the ultimate source of our sin.
Jesus tells us how to handle our suffering, physical or spiritual. It is to unite ours with His and make it redemptive for the world. That is the partial theology behind the old directive to “offer it up.”
I recently read a biography of Pope St. John Paul II, whom I have no hesitation calling “the Great.” Almost a whole generation has come along since his death in 2005, but they need to know of him and how we were blest with his pontificate. Of his physical sufferings in life, the author wrote the following:
During his pontificate, he dislocated his shoulder, broke his femur, underwent surgeries for his hip and ankle and to remove his appendix, gallstones, and an orange-sized tumor from his colon. He suffered osteoarthritis in his right knee, and intestinal disorder, the loss of hearing in both ears, Parkinson’s disease, and underwent routine colonoscopies and was given a feeding tube—and this does not even include the injuries he sustained when he was struck by a Nazi truck in Poland, the mono mononucleosis he suffered as a bishop, or the two bullets he took during his assassination attempt. Because he spent no fewer than 164 days in the Gelling Hospital, he started calling it Vatican III (after St. Peter’s and Castel Gandolfo)?
After one of his hospitalizations, he said “I accept this trial too from the hands of God, who arranges everything in accordance with His providential plans, and I offer it for the good of the Church.”
Add to that young Blessed Carlo Acutis’ remark that he offered his leukemia at age 15 “for the pope and the Church” and you begin to see the best interpretation of your sufferings from holy people of all ages.
That thinking makes us more than Churchgoers. We become, however gradually, true disciples. For all four seasons. And a good postscript here is this warning: “Satan is not afraid of a Bible with dust on it.”
God love you and give you His peace.
Rev. Peterson’s Reading & Gospel Summary
Reading I: Isaiah 50: 4c-9a
The servant-prophet has a certain confidence, knowing that his suffering has meaning and that he also has the Lord’s help to bear it.
Reading II: James 2: 14-18
True faith always manifests itself in good works. The component of love in our faith springs from our baptismal connection to Jesus.
The Gospel: Mark 8: 27-35
Peter’s “confession” of Jesus as the Christ is the pivotal event in all of Mark’s gospel. Jesus then teaches His chosen that true discipleship involves suffering.