We must remember that if we deny the value of suffering, there is no meaning to the cross. Our faith tells us that to many people, the cross is folly. However, we know that without the suffering of the cross, there would be no redemption. St. Paul also reminds us that we must complete what is lacking in the cross of Christ.
That’s a little tricky to understand, because Christ’s sacrifice it’s perfect and complete. So let’s see if we can get what he is saying. How can our suffering complete what is already perfect?
When the second person of the Trinity became incarnate, he took on our humanity, except our sinfulness. However, he did take on our suffering. Therefore, our suffering is not in vain. Human suffering is an opportunity to share in Christ’s passion.
In Evangelium Vitae B. John Paul wrote,
**The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one’s own material well-being. The so-called “quality of life” is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of the more profound dimensions-interpersonal, spiritual and religious-of existence.
In such a context suffering, an inescapable burden of human existence but also a factor of possible personal growth, is “censored”, rejected as useless, indeed opposed as an evil, always and in every way to be avoided. When it cannot be avoided and the prospect of even some future well-being vanishes, then life appears to have lost all meaning and the temptation grows in man to claim the right to suppress it.**
We have reduce the meaning of quality of life to well-being. When things are not as society believes they should be, we question the value of our lives and even of God’s plan for us. The problem is not with God’s plan, the problem is with the way that we look at things.
The Holy Father also reminds us that aging and the natural results of aging are part of God’s plan and it is honorable.
Old age is characterized by dignity and surrounded with reverence (cf. 2 Mac 6:23). The just man does not seek to be delivered from old age and its burden; on the contrary his prayer is this: “You, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth … so even to old age and grey hairs, O God, do not forsake me, till I proclaim your might to all the generations to come” (Ps 71:5, 18). The ideal of the Messianic age is presented as a time when “no more shall there be … an old man who does not fill out his days” (Is 65:20).
He’s trying to tell us that we live, not simply to be comfortable in this life. That’s not a bad thing. As the old Baltimore Catechism quoted from St. Thomas Aquinas, “God made us to know him, to love him, to serve him, and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” God does not promise us happiness and comfort in this world, only in the next, if we embrace the cross of Christ.
The Patriarch of the Ukrainian Catholic Church recently said that the Resurrection begins at the cross. Whatever suffering we’re experiencing today, is the first step toward the resurrection tomorrow.
A very good friend of mine recently wrote me a letter. He was remembering Bl. John Paul II. The Holy Father suffered a great deal. From the time that he was shot until the day that he died, almost 15 years later, his life was one cross after another. His health was deteriorating. The Church was in trouble. The world was at war. However, unlike Kenny Rogers who “folds them” in his famous song, the Holy Father continued. On the evening of April 2, 2005, the world watched and kept vigil with him. We waited for the Our Lady to take him home, as he believed. He knew that Mary, who had stood at the foot of the cross and watched her son suffer and die, would come to take him home to her son. It finally happened. He went home as we watched.
Had he given up and folded, had he stopped living what difference would he have made in the world? Whose life would he have impacted? We must remember that like Christ, we live, love, suffer, die and rise for a purpose. We have no idea who will benefit from our presence in the world and from our suffering.
Today, is the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe, one of our Franciscan friars who lived his life with TB. He put his life in God’s hands. God took him on mission to India and Japan. But he did not die. He returned to Poland. He was arrested by the Nazis and released. A few months later, he was arrested again. During his second term in the concentration camp, the Nazis condemned a young father to die. Friar Maximilian stepped up and volunteered to take his place. They tried to starve him. After weeks, they could not kill him that way. Then on August 14, the day before the Assumption of his beloved Blessed Mother, they killed him by lethal injection and on the 15th, the Solemnity of the Assumption, they burned his body and scattered his ashes, hoping to annul his life and make him disappear.
This is the 70th anniversary of his death and the world remembers. The man whom he saved never forgot. His children and grandchildren are alive today and they remember Brother Maximilian Maria Kolbe, the priest who suffered and accepted suffering out of pure love. The evil that drove the Nazis to make him disappear into the dark hole of history did not triumph. We never had a body to bury, but we have an entire family who is alive today, because Brother Max accepted suffering until God called him home.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
