Remedying Joyfully Our Imperfect Participation in Christ’s Sufferings, 23rd Monday (I), September 9, 2019

• We begin today a very powerful week in the liturgy, culminating on Saturday with the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, in 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, it’s not a curse but a caress, not a punishment but a privilege.
• In the Gospel today 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 Jews had totally misunderstood the meaning of the Sabbath, which was to restore us, to liberate us from self-imposed slavery. The Jews thought that the prohibition against servile work meant that Jews couldn’t even morally do acts of love. 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 kosher 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 say in his Letter to the Galatians elsewhere that he had learned to boast in the Cross of the Lord through which the world was crucified to him and him to the world, and in his First Letter to the Corinthians that the Cross was God’s “power and wisdom.” In today’s passage from the Letter to the Colossians, he showed his joyful participation in that power, wisdom, and glory. “I rejoice in my sufferings,” he said, because, as the translation has it, “In my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, which is the Church, of which I am a minister.” This is a much misinterpreted passage. Christ’s sufferings aren’t lacking, but our participation in them is. The “in my flesh” is misplaced. It should come later: “I am filling up what is lacking in my flesh in the afflictions of Christ.” Paul’s his manifold sufferings — whippings, stonings, shipwrecks, persecution, anxiety for the Churches, imprisonment and eventually beheading — were means by which he was able in his own body to share more deeply not just in Christ’s sufferings but in the love that made those sufferings bearable. That’s why Paul himself was able to rejoice in suffering.
• So our sufferings, although ontological bad, are meant to become a moral good when we unite them to Christ’s sufferings. They’re a means by which we grow in our participation in redemption, not just in receiving the fruits but through cooperating in Christ’s salvific love. But the way we do that isn’t by our own power.  The great mystery hidden for centuries, St. Paul goes on to say in today’s passage, is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Christ restores us from within, seeks to unite us totally to his Passion, and that’s the hope that will bring us to share his glory even when we are 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.”
• Someone who sought to make up what was lacking of Christ’s sufferings in his flesh for the sake of the Church, and someone who brought the hope of glory to so many others by helping them allow Christ to be Christ in them, is St. Peter Claver, the great apostle to the slaves in Colombia. As a young Jesuit, he left his native Spain in order to go to Cartagena to minister to the African slaves where they would disembark after a brutal trans-Pacific journey, be sold and bought. Their condition was execrable. He spent his last 44 years of life as a slave to the slaves, a Good Samaritan, catechizing them by learning their dialects or finding translators, baptizing more than 300,000 of them, sharing their life and doing everything he could to introduce them to Christ and to the hope of glory he brings. He slept in the slaves’ quarters rather than in their masters’ when he came to preach missions to them. And he sought to bring the message of conversion to the slaveowners. In the letter that the Church ponders on his feast day in the Office of Readings, he shows how everything culminated in introducing them to the mystery of God’s love on the Cross, so that they may unite their own sufferings to Christ and become truly interior free. “Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity,” he wrote to his Jesuit superiors, “numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship. Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them. … We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick. Large numbers of the sick were lying on the wet ground or rather in puddles of mud. … We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. … There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected. With the help of a tile we pulled some live coals together and placed them in the middle near the dying men. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion. Then, using our own cloaks, for they had nothing of this sort, and to ask the owners for others would have been a waste of words, we provided for them a smoke treatment, by which they seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see. This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless. Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. We made every effort to encourage them with friendly gestures and displayed in their presence the emotions which somehow naturally tend to hearten the sick. After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul. When by their answers to our questions they showed they had sufficiently understood this, we went on to a more extensive instruction, namely, about the one God, who rewards and punishes each one according to his merit, and the rest. We asked them to make an act of contrition and to manifest their detestation of their sins. Finally, when they appeared sufficiently prepared, we declared to them the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion. Showing them Christ fastened to the cross, as he is depicted on the baptismal font on which streams of blood flow down from his wounds, we led them in reciting an act of contrition in their own language.” Everything ultimately led to their focus on Christ fasted to the Cross and how the blood and water flowing from his side made Baptism a real share in his passion, death and resurrection. He was showing them how to enter into and participate in Christ’s sufferings. He was lead them to the reality of having Christ in them.
• The summit of this mystery of “Christ in you” literally takes place at Mass, which we begin with the sign of the Cross, finish with the blessing of the Cross, and in the middle receive the fruit from the cruciform Tree of Life. It’s in the Mass that Christ in us helps us to participate every more in the power and wisdom of his love so that, making up what is lacking in our participation in his saving word, we may become more and more like him.

Reading 1
COL 1:24–2:3