Rejoicing in Suffering for the Sake of Others, 23rd Monday (I), September 11, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 23rd Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
22nd Anniversary of 9/11
September 11, 2023
Col 1:24-2:3, Ps 62, Lk 6:6-11

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in this homily:

• We begin today a very powerful week in the liturgy. On Thursday we will celebrate the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the day after Our Lady of Sorrows, on Wednesday, the memorial of St. John Chrysostom, who suffered much for preaching the truth out of season, and on Saturday we will commemorate the martyrs Saints Cyprian and Cornelius and remember the dry martyr Cardinal François Xavier Nguyen van Thuan. It’s a week during which we will ponder our “spes unica,” our only hope, which is Christ on the Cross and our summons to pick up our Cross every day and unite ourselves to him. It’s a week to help us to recall that the Cross is not so much a sign of pain but of the love that bears pain, a curse but a caress, a privilege not a punishment.
• In the Gospel we see Jesus suffering for doing good, for saving, for giving witness to the true meaning of the Sabbath. This would be a foretaste of Good Friday when the Sanhedrin, Pharisees, Scribes, Saduccees and Herodians all conspired to execute Jesus. The Scribes and Pharisees had totally misunderstood the meaning of the Sabbath, which was to restore us, to liberate us from self-imposed slavery. They thought that the prohibition against servile work meant that Jews couldn’t even morally do acts of love on the Sabbath. Jesus asked the rather absurd question as to whether God would be pleased or displeased if people did good on the Sabbath rather than evil, to save life rather than to destroy it. They didn’t answer, for obvious reasons. The truth is that the Pharisees, on the Sabbath, were precisely there trying to do evil, to entrap Jesus, to plot to destroy his life, but they thought that that was somehow acceptable while Jesus’ healing the withered hand of a man was somehow what God wanted to prevent. Nevertheless, Jesus was willing to embrace the Cross, the sufferings, in order to restore this man and to restore us all to health.
• Another who was willing to embrace the Cross was St. Paul, who would elsewhere eventually learn to boast in the Cross of the Lord through which the world was crucified to him and him to the world, the Cross he said was God’s “power and wisdom,” the Cross by which he was crucified by Christ so that the life he now lived in the flesh he lived by faith in the Son of God who loved him and gave his life for him. He embraced the Cross in his manifold sufferings — whippings, stonings, shipwrecks, persecution, anxiety for the Churches, imprisonment and eventually beheading. But despite all of this, he said, in words on which Christians should never cease to ponder, “I rejoice in my sufferings.” His sufferings filled him with joy. He rejoiced, he said, in them because he was making up what was lacking in his own flesh of the sufferings of Christ. This is a much misinterpreted passage because many translations aren’t accurate. Christ’s sufferings aren’t lacking, but our participation in them is. Our suffering, however, helps us to enter into Christ’s sufferings, and this is part of our own restoration. St. Paul was also rejoicing in his sufferings “for [the Colossians’] sake.” He knew that our sufferings, united to Christ’s, are co-redemptive, and so that, rather than any masochistic delight in pain, was the reason he was able to rejoice. This mystery of co-redeeming love, St. Paul said, is the great mystery hidden for centuries, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Christ restores us from within, seeking to unite us totally to his Passion, but we need to allow this hope of glory to penetrate within the occasional darkness of suffering. St. Paul was writing all of this in the context of his being in a prison cell dictating a letter to the Church in Colossae where the gnostic heresy was spreading like a spiritual flu. The Gnostics were dualists who believed that matter was evil and that God was strictly spiritual; for that reason there could be nothing like the incarnation. Some of them thought Christ couldn’t have been God; most thought the Christ just “seemed” to have a human body, but there was therefore no suffering, no crucifixion, no resurrection of the body, no sacraments (which use matter), no Mystical Body, etc. St. Paul was saying that the mystery that was being revealed was not merely that God had become man in Christ, but that he wanted to become Christ in us, to take up his dwelling place within us. The means by which he would become perfect in us is through the Cross, so that we could die to whatever in us was not worthy of God, and learn to love like him. This is why St. Paul was willing to endure a “great struggle.”
• Here on earth, the summit of this mystery of “Christ in you” literally takes place at Mass. Today as we remember not only the evils and the sufferings caused 22 years ago in the terrorist attacks, but also the heroism of those who endured suffering and fear to try to saye others, with many dying in the process, we approach Christ and ask him to help make us through this Holy Communion more like Todd Beamer on United 93, more like the firemen who rushed into rather than from danger, more like those through whom Christ’s likeness shown in the midst of dust and darkness. Christ in us happens in a special way in the Eucharist and sends us out, together with him, with joy, even and especially in times when Christ blesses us with the Cross so that we might become more and more like him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
COL 1:24–2:3

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