Bing Crosby and Suffering

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

           

“You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”  That’s what Bing Crosby told millions of people in song in the 1940s.  And I’m sure, during the Depression and World War II, looking at the little good things in life was a key just to keeping morale up.  But apparently Jesus never heard the song.  Because in today’s Gospel, He’s not very positive.  He not only foretells his own passion–His own suffering and persecution and gruesome death–but He quickly follows that by saying that all His disciples have to be prepared to suffer–to carry their own crosses daily.  That’s not the way you tend to get people to join in a cause.

            We can imagine, then, why it was so hard for St. Peter to accept what Jesus was saying.  If Bishop Boyea told me today that in a few years he was going to be led before a firing squad and shot, I would probably do everything I could to stop that from happening!  He’s a good man, a good bishop, and, as far as I know, hasn’t done anything to deserve being put to death.  Peter was in a similar situation with Jesus.  And yet, Jesus affirmed that His mission was to die, but also to be raised from the dead, neither of which the apostles really understood.

            We would probably all want to prevent someone we greatly admired and loved from suffering.  We don’t see suffering as a good thing, and we try to prevent it as much as possible in our own lives, and in the lives of others.  And yet, Jesus tells St. Peter that his desire to keep Jesus from suffering is not the way that God approaches the world, but is the way a human approaches the world.  So does God love to make people suffer?

            Of course not!  And yet, God’s perspective on suffering, as we see in Jesus, is different, even from the Chosen People’s understanding of suffering.  The Book of Job is the Jews trying to come to grips with the problem of suffering–the dilemma of how a good God could let innocent people suffer.  We’re all too ready to accept that suffering comes from doing wrong, the bad consequence of a bad action, but how could it happen to someone good?  Even the disciples ask Jesus in the Gospel according to John whether the man born blind sinned or his parents.  Suffering is a tough question, especially when it comes to the suffering of the innocent.  We avoid it as much as possible.  But Jesus embraced it as the means to salvation for the whole human race.  So is suffering good?

            The short answer is no.  Suffering only entered the world when sin did.  It is a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve.  The long answer is no, but yes.  Suffering is always bad, but it can become good.  How can bad become good?  I don’t fully know.  But God does it all the time.  St. Paul says that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  God can change the bad in our life into good for ourselves or for others.  God is that powerful!! 

            But while we don’t know exactly how, we do know how we can participate in God changing bad into good: we unite our suffering with Jesus on the cross.  I think we all avoid suffering because we know, perhaps innately, how wrong suffering is.  But, when we unite our suffering with Jesus on the cross, the suffering is not just a deprivation of the good in our lives, but becomes a participation in the life of Jesus.  We more fully unite with Jesus when we suffer, because He came precisely to suffer, die, and be raised.  And the more we share in Jesus’ death, the more we share in His resurrection. 

How do we unite ourselves with Jesus?  It’s as easy as saying, “Jesus, I unite my suffering with you.”  That’s all we have to do.  We can use other words, other prayers, but at the heart, all we have to do is unite our suffering to Jesus.  And Jesus, who is no stranger to suffering–one of His chosen best friends betrayed Him; another denied Him; almost all of them abandoned Him in His hour of need–receives that, and, as God, changes it from bad to good.  A few years back I buried a 51-yr-old father of seven who lost his long battle with cancer; I have buried an infant; I have prayed with a woman who has given so much of her life to support the church as she learned she had breast cancer; those are major forms of suffering that we can unite with Jesus.  Or maybe you have a broken heart as your boyfriend or girlfriend dumps you; you have to start school again (as a student, or a teacher); you didn’t make the team or band you wanted; you feel like everything is going wrong; you stubbed your toe or hit your funny bone; all of those are sufferings that we can unite with Jesus, as well as everything in-between the major and minor.

We can also unite our suffering with Jesus in the bread and wine we offer at Mass.  We may sometimes feel like we are the heads of grain that have been pulverized to make wheat or like the grapes which were pressed to make wine.  Unite that in silence with the words of the Eucharistic prayer which I pray on your behalf to the Father.  And just as miraculous as God changing bad to good, God changes that bread and wine into the Body and Blood of His Son, Jesus Christ.  How many opportunities do we miss each day because we forget to unite our suffering with Jesus!?!  I know it’s true for me; I bet it’s true for you.

Suffering is not good.  We are not encouraged to seek it out (it will certainly come to us without looking for it!).  But neither do we preach a Gospel of prosperity: just because you love God does not mean you are going to have an easy life.  But our God loves us so much, that He knows what it means to suffer.  Our God loves us so much that He changes bad into good.  Take a minute or two after my homily (and each day) and think about the suffering that you have had to endure, no matter how big or how small, and unite it with the bread and the wine, and receive back the Body and Blood of Jesus, which give us strength in our suffering.