Fifth Sunday 1997 #2

What is deepest and most real in human life

Lent begins this Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, and it is also Black History Month, so there is an interesting confluence of factors for these readings because it seems to me that they throw a lot of light on these two events, and the two events throw a lot of light on the readings as well. Things start with this extraordinary passage from Job: "Do not human beings have a hard service on earth." They are not talking about a job; they’re talking about life. I must confess that when I read this a couple of weeks ago I was jolted. Although I know the Book of Job fairly well, to see it put that boldly was like being knocked on the side of the head with a two-by-four. What Job was saying was not that he was down in the dumps because he was having a bad day. No, this is clearly a reflection of the whole Book and that’s why the Jews thought that this Book should be put in the Bible. Their view was that life was difficult, period, full-stop. And it’s doubly impressive if you realize, at the time when Job was written, the Jews didn’t have any idea about a life after death: they were just talking about womb to tomb, and nothing after that. That was their understanding of the human condition.

Well, what has Lent to do with this? I think that one way of looking at Lent is, to use that lovely French word, approfondir, to deepen ourselves, to connect ourselves to what is deepest and most real in human life. Why? In order to live at that depth instead of bouncing around on the surface of life, like I do most of the time. I propose that one of the depths of life involves this understanding that life is really hard. (I will get to Black History Month a little later.)

I don’t think that the jolt that I experienced is very unusual because we in North America live in a society which is probably best expressed in a couple of my favorite ads. We talk about headaches as being "unfair:" I don’t know if any body remembers the diaphanous image of a mother and a little baby, and nice soft lighting, and pastel colours, and the voice-over saying: "Don’t let anything as unfair as a headache interrupt this moment." I really do believe the we North Americans understand pain as being unfair. Another great ad speaks of "the heart-break of psoriasis," as if a skin ailment is the only thing that will break my heart. Talk about superficiality... I really think that we all believe, and at a university it’s even worse, that we live in a Molson’s ad. There may be classes and exams but that’s all by way of exception, real life is to be lived with a 24 and a bunch of my buds coming over to watch videos at night.

Well, it is very hard to move away from that understanding of the way that life is supposed to be to this passage from Job, and things get even worse when you look at the passages from Corinthians and the Gospel of Mark. Job was just talking about the regular stuff that happens: "I got a flat tire... I’ve been fired... The bank’s screwed up my account..." In that sense, yes, life is not made to my specifications. But there is something more important and more significant in the second level of difficulty that Paul is talking about and what Mark attributes to Jesus too. Paul is saying that he is working like mad, and it is in Second Corinthians that he talks about being ship-wrecked, and jailed, and scourged... Why? Because bad stuff happens? No... He wanted even more problems because he wanted to live out the truth of those depths that he saw. And this, of course, is where Jesus stands. If you read this passage from Mark as straight history, which, of course, it is not, Jesus comes and makes a big hit, people are looking for him and the PR people are busting their guts with joy because it worked... But Jesus says: "No, no, no, folks, I’ve got to go someplace else, I have to undergo the business of starting again, of saying this to other people." There is no easiness in that kind of life, and this is where the Black History thing is really useful.

They figure that 11million blacks were chained and literally stuffed in boats by our good ancestors from England, France, Spain... with the help of a few Arabs and a few of the Black Royalty..., and they ended up squashed all over Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, and of course we got the residue in Canada from the underground railway. It is extraordinary to think of that experience. This morning at Mass we sang two spirituals: one was Go Down Moses and the other was There is a Balm in Gilead. These were sung by people who were not Christians, but somehow the message of Jesus took to them with a depth and pervasiveness that just boggles my mind because the message was preached by the same people that kidnapped them, murdered hundreds of thousands of them, and then treated them as chattel when they finally got here. Spirituals are a miracle, they are a testimony of the reality of grace. Somehow out of that suffering came the spirituals which have given birth to the blues, you know, Billie Holiday and that crowd. That precisely comes out of an earnest experience of a level of difficulty of life that we can only guess at. And somehow they were sustained by that religious understanding, and they still continue to live out of that.

I don’t mean that all black people are saints, don’t get me wrong, but we, often enough, speak of God as a great Aspirin in the sky, and listen to the Robert Schuler School of Theology that says that God wants you to be a millionaire... We could do far worse than simply thinking about the black experience in order to deepen ourselves and also to offset two terribly abberant forms of Christianity, one of which says that if Jesus died for our sins we don’t have to bother anymore, we’re home-free. There is a lot of that type of Christianity around.

The other type of Christianity is not a whole lot better. It runs along lines something like this: "Jesus came to give me a stiff upper lip." It is a Christianized version of ancient Roman Stoicism that says that life is hard so I have to inure myself in some way. No, no, no. The difficulty of life, from Jesus’ perspective, does not create the bloody but unbowed figure that is the model of the Stoic; it creates the person who, out of their own suffering, opens up to the world and to other people as well. That is not as far fetched and remote as it might seem. I suggest that you try a little experiment by thinking of the people in your life who seem most real. I’d lay money on the probability that suffering, which they did not run away from but endured, precisely enriched them. Again, how many blacks were profoundly humanized by this.

So, that’s why I think all this stuff really comes together, and it leaves me with a sort of program for Lent. First of all, do I really believe life is hard or do I just spend inordinate amounts of time escaping that recognition and seeking all kinds of illusory alternatives. I think I do. To ask that question earnestly and give it a fair amount of attention is very useful. And then, if I really do think that life is hard, I should ask myself the question: what makes life hard for me? And then the final question, which I think really will take us to Easter, is to ask: do I suffer from the lovelessness in my own life and in the world? That is the central point of my suffering, not that I have a backache or flunked another test. That is, at least, a fairly full agenda and I hope it will be useful for Lent.

To other sermons