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With God's love
banish the resentment
of suffering
Reflections on the
lessons
for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:11-16
Hebrews 5:5-10
John
12:20-33
Today's gospel seems to me to be about growing up. And, if there are any among us this morning who haven't done that yet, I'm sorry to say that today 's sermon is mostly about how growing up isn't all fun and games. That's a really tired old cliché, I know. But it's true. And I've been reminded of it several times lately. My recent milestone birthday still has me wrestling with some pretty hard questions about what I've done with the first (I hope) half of my life.
And a couple of other moments this week have only complicated things. I went to the opera and heard an old favorite of mine: Puccini's La Boheme. When I was 20 it seemed to me a story about living life to the hilt. But at 40 it struck me as the sad tale of a bunch of kids who don't know enough yet to get out of the way of heartbreak if they possibly can.
And an article in the Times this week reported a study of how junior high school age kids look at growing up. From an adult point of view: Growing up too fast. About romance, a 12-year-old boy philosophized, "Sometimes people get hurt. Sure, I've been hurt. But that's gonna happen at any age." He's right, of course, but I hated to think of him talking that way, at that age. I want people to have a nice long time before the hurt starts in.
But, that's probably a fantasy. A luxury version of youth and innocence that seldom ever happens, probably shouldn't even happen ever. If I were to listen to the Bible, I'd know that -- according to their capacity -- every human being experiences a kind of unrelenting anguish: Emotion, spiritual, physical . . . some kind or another of anguish. And that every person -- according to their capacity -- can't always understand it, or resolve it, just has to bear it. It's the human condition. The condition to which Jesus spoke, and to which many other artists have spoken. And still try today.
Bearing anguish. It may lie deep under the surface, below other people's radar, way down in the soul. For many people (most people) -- the lucky ones -- the anguish stays out of the way of the chores and tasks and conversations of everyday life. Only rising up into the front of our minds under stress or in the lonely privacy of sleepless nights.
If the anguish of adolescents seems smaller to us than our own adult suffering -- well, we're wrong about that. There are burdens for everyone, and they're full-sized to everyone who carries them. Pardon me for making a Sunday sermon into a big downer, but it's true that suffering is our constant companion. It belongs to human existence. So what do we do about it?
We talked before about a kind of denial and self-deception that makes many people act puzzled that a loving God can allow suffering. "If there's a God, then why isn't life a big party?" they ask. Well, that's a little bit naïve. And the time of the human race's childhood is past. And maturity demands that those of us who assay to live a fully realized human life struggle to come to a deeper understanding and a more mature attitude toward suffering.
I bring this all up only because today's readings demand that we take a look -- like it or not -- at the Passion and suffering and cross and death of Jesus. Palm Sunday is next week, then Holy Week follows. It's the most prominent challenge of the Christian year, but only a dramatization of a daily challenge: To see the path of evolution. The evolution of the whole world. And to see how evolution is repeated in each individual life.
Suffering and death. The death and resurrection. Then resurrection and a whole new kind of life. The life cycle of the earth is the prototype for our own particular histories. The mystery of human life and the mystery of the earth's natural dying and rebirth are so intimately connected that talking about one actually IS talking about the other.
As I said earlier, Jesus spoke about that connection. And other artists did -- and do -- too. That's what poets do for a living. And I was surprised at the number of poets who seemed to speak to me all week as I tried to think about grains of wheat falling into the earth to die and spring alive again. And about how Jesus faced his hour when he knew it had come.
One, the great German, Goethe, could have been writing a sermon on this very gospel when he wrote: "As long as you have not comprehended / dying and becoming, / you are but a shadowy guest / on Earth."
Another poet with me in this is a favorite of mine from school days. The Italian Dante Alighieri. He wrote "The Divine Comedy" in the early 1300s. It 's a three-volume exploration of the human spirit and the political machine and how they both look when held up to the light of God. Obviously, it's a long poem. One with a big scope, too. In it, the narrator goes on a tour of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and takes note of everything he sees there.
Today's gospel reminds me of the moment when Dante's tour leaves Hell and starts up the mountainside that is Purgatory. Hell is darkness all the time. So is Purgatory. But there are two kinds of darkness. Hell is a "blackness of meaningless confusion and clamor". Purgatory is different. There he sees a "clean sapphire-blue darkness out of which great stars shine". Dante has described the transition from disorientation and hopelessness to hope in a comprehensible kind of dark.
We live in a culture that clamors for immediate release from pain and suffering. But Dante -- and Goethe, and Jesus -- tell us that sitting in Hell and demanding heaven is the perfect way to remain imprisoned forever. The souls in Dante's symbolic hell are outraged to be there. They're mad all the time and insist that a terrible injustice is going on. They are positive that they deserve not ultimate punishments, but ultimate rewards.
In the poem, the souls in Purgatory suffer exactly the same torments as the folks in Hell. Only they suffer in clear darkness, with the stars -- with an end, with a goal -- in sight. They suffer with willing acceptance. They have dared to recognize that their suffering has meaning and that they are -- even if regrettably or even accidentally so -- somehow or another responsible for their state. The souls in Hell are stuck there. The souls in Purgatory are on their way through a battle and out the other side.
I'm not suggesting that guilt is a good thing. Not even that suffering is a good thing. Just that suffering IS. And that what the presence of love (God's love) in our hearts does is not to banish suffering, but to banish the resentment of suffering. In Dante's symbolism, Hell has no light. Heaven is full of the light of God. Purgatory is lit by Venus, the planet of love.
When Dante steps out of Hell and into a place where the suffering is not senseless, but purposeful, he's describing the moment in which the human spirit comes to see suffering, to understand it, and to accept it as one of the costs of following the vision of an individual's life and destiny. In other words, if you know what you're paying, and why, then the cost usually doesn't seem all that out of line.
I don't understand this myself. But -- like a parrot -- I keep repeating what I hear from all around me. Suffering, of all kinds, is our participation in the cycle of healing and rebirth -- the new creation of the world -- that all of us (grains of wheat, children, adults, you name it) made in the image of God play out our roles.
This is all very mystical. This is the last sermon you'll hear from me before Easter, so it's my take on Palm Sunday and Holy Week all rolled up into one and delivered a week early. And I'm afraid it gets a D- in "making the gospel understandable in human terms". But before he went to his great trial Jesus prayed to God "My soul is deeply disturbed. But what can I say? Save me from this hour? No. There is a purpose in all this, and I'm willing to do what it takes to bring it on home". Forgive me if this doesn't help you bear your own crosses with understanding. I'm sorry if your darkness isn't sapphire blue with great stars shining in it. Mine really isn't either. But Jesus and that 12-year-old in the Times understand that people hurt. At least we have the Bible and other great poems to remind us that rage makes suffering into Hell and love makes it a pathway to peace.
-- Mark Lewis
Reference: Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy by Helen M. Luke. Paperback (March 1993)
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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