1 February 2019
Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Hebrews 10:32-39 places special emphasis on the special role that endurance has in the Christian life. It is not possible to do God’s will if one is not willing to endure suffering: “you need endurance to do the will of God and receive what he has promised” (Heb 10:36). Anyone who believes that because Christ suffered we do not have to, has replaced the message of the gospel with magical thinking. Today’s first reading insists upon this point, which Pope John Paul II magnificently reiterates inSalvifici doloris.
The resurrection does not free us from suffering, but rather gives us the grace, the joy, and the freedom to endure it no longer in a meaningless way, but out of love. This is one of the reasons that the passion of the Christ plays such an important role in genuinely Catholic mysticism. The root meaning of the word passion is closely related to that of endure. In “action,” one “acts upon” another; in “passion,” one is “acted upon,” one “endures.” In his passion, Christ endures all things, he endures the sin, hatred, and injustice of the whole world. Let us be clear, this is not possible for us. We break when faced with just a little suffering and injustice. But, it is possible for us to follow Christ as far as he would allow us to, and in fact, he calls us to such following. What Christ endures, he endures out of love of us and out of love for his father. When we enter into that same love, we become capable, by his grace, of enduring a little something out of love for God and out of love for our neighbor.
The resurrection does not free us from this suffering, enduring love; it makes us capable of it.How? We should not try to find some sort of purely psychological mechanism for this, for it is a miracle, like all grace. We are not capable of this miracle ourselves. But we can provide good soil for the seed of the Word that falls into our ground and dies, so that while we “sleep and rise night and day, the seed will sprout and grow, though we know not how” (Mk 4:27).