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| Anna Beam (Kylie Rogers) and her mother Christy (Jennifer Garner) in 'Miracles from Heaven' |
(Good Friday 2016: This homily was given on March 25, 2016 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, RI, by Fr. Raymond Suriani. Read Isaiah 52:13-53:12; also read the Passion Narrative of St. John.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Good Friday 2016]
The
cross of Jesus Christ reminds us that there is often a very close connection in
this life between love and suffering. Our Lord, of course, made that clear during
the Last Supper when he said those famous words, “Greater love no one has, than
to lay down his life for his friends.”
Laying
down one’s life obviously involves some suffering—in most cases a great deal of
suffering!
St.
Bernadette—to whom the Blessed Mother appeared in Lourdes, France, in 1858—said
something similar once. She said, “Why
must we suffer? Because here below pure
love cannot exist without suffering.”
Jennifer
Garner witnesses to this truth in a very powerful way in the new movie, “Miracles
from Heaven”—a film that I highly recommend.
I saw the other day it over in Stonington. Garner plays Christy Beam, a young mother of
3 from Texas, whose 10-year-old daughter Anna is diagnosed with a rare and
incurable digestive disease—a disease that puts her in constant pain and
threatens to take her life. I won’t be a
spoiler here and reveal all the details of the story, but I will say that one
of the things that becomes crystal clear in the movie (which is based on real
events) is how much Christy Beam loves her daughter, and how much she is
suffering with her daughter. You can
literally “feel” this woman’s emotional pain as you watch the film and see her
frantically trying to get Anna the help she needs. She suffers much, because she loves much.
To
the extent that we love another human person, we suffer when they do. We
also suffer when they reject us or betray us or attack us in some way.
This,
incidentally, is one reason why the sufferings that Jesus endured during his
passion were far greater than any sufferings we may endure during our lives. Christy Beam suffered a lot, because she
loved her daughter a lot—but she didn’t love her daughter perfectly. None of us loves
in that way on this side of the grave—because we’re all sinners who are prone
to selfishness.
But
Jesus DID love us with a perfect love! He
loved EVERYONE with a perfect love!
Which means that when he was rejected by the scribes and Pharisees, and
betrayed by Judas, and abandoned by his friends, and attacked by the Romans,
his suffering was far, far greater than ours would be in similar circumstances.
He
suffered the most, because he loved the
most.
If
we understand this connection between suffering and love, my brothers and
sisters, we can gain a new and far better perspective on the crosses we’re
forced to deal with every day.
Let’s
be honest, most people see their crosses in purely negative terms. They see their trials and sufferings as
liabilities, and as liabilities only. Saints, on the other hand, also see their
crosses in a positive way: as OPPORTUNITIES—as
opportunities to love. And isn’t
that precisely how the Blessed Trinity looked at the cross of Jesus? To God, the cross of Christ was not only the
instrument chosen to bring salvation to the world. To God the cross was also an opportunity: an opportunity for him to
demonstrate his PERFECT LOVE to his imperfect creatures.
I
mentioned St. Bernadette at the beginning of my homily; I’ll mention her again
now at the end.
Bernadette,
I believe, had this positive perspective on her sufferings, which were
many. She grew up in poverty; she had a
number of physical ailments; the civil authorities mistreated her; her parish
priest didn’t believe her at first when she told him she had seen the Blessed
Mother; she even suffered later on in the convent after she became a religious
sister. And yet, she still managed to be
grateful to God in the midst of it all.
To
a great extent, that’s because she looked at her sufferings in the right way! It’s because she knew that all her crosses,
as bad as they were, were only temporary, and that if she could love others in
the midst of those trials, she would someday experience an eternal reward—the reward
Mary had promised Bernadette in one of her apparitions.
This
all can be seen clearly in something the saint wrote before she died, a writing
that’s come to be known as Bernadette’s “testament of gratitude”. It reads as follows:
§
“For the poverty in which my mother and
father lived, for the fact that everything failed for us, for the collapse of
the mill, for the fact that I had to look after the children whom I was feeding
too much and for the dirty noses of the children, for the fact that I had to
guard the sheep, for the constant tiredness, thank you, my God!”
§
“Thank you, my God, for the prosecutor
and the police commissioner, for the policemen, and for the harsh words of
Father Peyramale!”
§
“For the days in which you came, Mary,
for the ones in which you did not come, I will never be able to thank you…only
in Paradise.”
§
“For the slaps in the face, for the
ridicule, the insults, for those who thought I was crazy, those who suspect me
of lying, those who suspected me of wanting to gain something from it, thank
you, my Lady.”
§
“For my spelling, which I never
learned, for the memory that I never had, for my ignorance and for my
stupidity, thank you.”
§
“For the fact that my mother died so
far away, for the pain I felt when my father, instead of hugging his little
Bernadette, called me, “Sister Marie-Bernard”, I thank you, Jesus.”
§
“I thank you for the heart you gave me,
so delicate and sensitive, which you filled with bitterness.”
§
“For the fact that Mother Josephine
proclaimed that I was good for nothing, thank you. For the sarcasm of the
Mother Superior: her harsh voice, her injustices, her irony and for the bread
of humiliation, thank you.”
§
“Thank you that I was the privileged
one when it came to be reprimanded, so that my sisters said, ‘How lucky it is
not to be Bernadette.’”
§
“Thank you that I was the Bernadette
threatened with imprisonment because she had seen you, Holy Virgin.”
§
“Thank you that I was that Bernadette
who was so frail and worthless that when people saw her, they said to
themselves, ‘That must be her,’ the Bernadette that people looked at as if she
were an unusual animal.”
§
“For this miserable body that you gave
me, for this illness that burns like fire and smoke, for my decaying bones, for
my perspiration and fever, for my dull and acute pain, thank you, my God.”
§
“And for this soul which you have given
me, for the desert of inner dryness, for your nights and your flashes of
lightening, for your silence and your thunders, for everything. For you—when
you were present and when you were not—thank you, Jesus.”
Those are the words of a very strong—and a very loving—woman of God.
St. Bernadette, pray for us on this
Good Friday, that we will come to see our sufferings as you saw yours—as opportunities to love—and someday experience
the reward of that love with you and all the saints in God’s eternal kingdom. Amen.
