Homily: 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B
A number of years ago, while I was still in the seminary, I spent time
in Guatemala in order to study Spanish and immerse myself in Hispanic
culture. I remember that one of the
things that struck me about life in Guatemala was how frustrating it seemed be
for the Guatemalan people.
All of the infrastructure things that make our lives here relatively
comfortable—things like, good roads, new cars, convenience stores, etc.—are
relatively underdeveloped there (if they’re even developed at all). I imagined that this meant that their daily
lives are probably filled with frustrations as they try to accomplish even what
I might consider to be the simplest tasks; because, for example, maybe the
electricity shut off, or the gas station was out of fuel, or the road washed
out in the heavy rain last night. They,
I supposed, are a people very familiar with frustration.
On some level, however, all of us are familiar with
frustration in one form or another. When
your pen runs out of ink, or your coupon is expired, or you leave your
leftovers on the table at the restaurant… these are all examples of how we
experience frustrations even in the smallest things of our daily lives. Now, as
weird as this may seem, I want to propose to you that all of those frustrations
have a purpose. “A purpose? Father, frustrations are things that get in
the way of accomplishing other things.
In other words, they get in the way of fulfilling a purpose, so how
could they themselves have a purpose?”
Believe it or not, frustrations are meant to be a signal to us that
something isn’t right. In other words,
much in the same way that the pain that we feel in our hand when we touch a hot
stove has as its purpose to warn us that we are doing something to harm
ourselves, so too frustrations have as their purpose to remind us that the
world is “out of order”.
Why do we need to be reminded that the world is “out of
order”? Well, because our souls long for
things to be “in order”. Let’s think
about this for a second: if being “out of order” was the way things were
supposed to be, then we wouldn’t get frustrated because everything would seem
to be just as it was supposed to be. For
example, in a world where “out of order” is the way things are supposed to be,
if I were to blowout a tire on my car during a trip I wouldn’t get frustrated
because I would be able to say to myself “Well, I expected this to happen
because that’s how the world works.” But
“out of order” is not the “order” of things, and so we become frustrated when
“out of order” things happen. We
instinctively know that “out of order” isn’t right and so we experience
discomfort when we encounter it as a sign to remind us that it isn’t right.
And this is so important for us, and here’s why. You see, when I think about it, I find that
there are two basic ways that we deal with frustration: 1) we confront it and
try to overcome it (that is, we try to put back “in order” what is “out of
order”) or 2) we resign ourselves to being frustrated and thus give up on
trying to overcome it altogether (in other words, we accept that being
frustrated with “out of order” is the only way it can be). Because there are so many things that are
outside of our control in this world, we more often than not deal with
frustration in the second way that I described.
The danger of this is that, if we are constantly facing frustrations, we
might quickly lose hope that anything really ever could be “in order” again. This can lead us into apathy, which numbs our
sense of frustration, thus causing us to forget that there is an ideal “order” for
which we should be striving, and “out of order” becomes the “way things are
supposed to be”.
In the first reading, we heard an encouraging proclamation
from Isaiah. In his proclamation, he is
talking about how God is coming to vindicate his people from their enemies and
he is using terms of restoration: that is, of restoring things that are “out of
order” so as to put them back “in order”.
In other words, Isaiah is saying that, when God’s vindication comes,
things that had been out of order—like eyes that are blind, ears that cannot
hear, legs that cannot be used for jumping, and tongues that cannot speak—will
be restored to order—for the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will
leap, and the mute will speak. He
proclaimed this to them so that they wouldn’t become resigned to accept what
they couldn’t change and thus become apathetic to how “out of order” everything
was. In God’s eyes, it was better for
the people to have a healthy sense of frustration, for that would keep them
longing for the order that he planned to restore for them; and so would
strengthen their faith.
As Christians we know that God sent his Son Jesus to
vindicate us from our enemies and thus to restore order to the world; and the
stories recorded for us in the Gospels are meant to support this claim. Today we heard of how Jesus opened the ears
of a man who was deaf and of how he freed the tongue of that same man who also
had a speech impediment. This was a sign
that Jesus had come to vindicate God’s people as he put back “in order” that
which was “out of order” in this man.
In this we also see that, when Jesus brings restoration, he
makes it personal. What I mean is this:
instead of healing this man in front of the whole crowd so that everyone could
see, he takes the man aside, away from the crowd, before he heals him. Jesus’ interest was in restoring to this man
what he, perhaps, never had—the ability to hear and to speak—and not in making
a scene in front of the crowd. In this
way, he shows us that he wants to meet each of us, personally, so as to put
back “in order” what is “out of order” in our lives: thus freeing us from what
oppresses us and restoring us to fullness of life.
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, let us not be afraid to
bring our life’s biggest frustrations to Jesus, because these are the things
most “out of order”—either in our lives or in the world—and Jesus wants to
restore them to order for us. And let us
hold on to hope: the hope we have in the fact that Jesus has vindicated us; and
that the world of perfect order that our hearts long for—the kingdom of
God—will come to us when Jesus comes again to make all things new.
Given at Saint Mary Nativity Parish:
Joliet, IL – September 5th, 2021
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