A Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Jeremiah 20: 7-9 Romans 12: 1-2 Matthew 16: 21-27
Many petitions are answered so quickly we forget we ever asked them of God. Many others are not answered, but the need was so shallow that, over time, we forget them as well. But what of those disappointments that are too poignant ever to be forgotten? Unanswered prayers, still so right in our eyes that we remember them decades later.
If God has disappointed you that deeply, you can appreciate Jeremiah’s turn of phrase about being duped by God. You have hoped and prayed in vain.
Perhaps you have decided that there is no God. Perhaps you have continued to hope and to trust. Very few do either exclusively. Belief and unbelief tend to grow side by side in all of us, entwined like vines. Wherever you may be in those tangles, let’s ask again what it means to be disappointed by God.
Here are three answers—or at least takeaways—to the question: What does it mean to be deeply disappointed by God?
Here are three answers—or at least takeaways—to the question: What does it mean to be deeply disappointed by God?
The first answer is so obvious as to be overlooked. We are not God. The acuity of this answer appears when we contrast the two shoals that this insight skirts. If God answered every prayer when and how we expected, it would not prove the existence of God. It would mean that we were God. What else would we be if reality responded so readily to our will?
Now glance at the opposite shore. If no prayer were ever answered, if every quest for meaning were frustrated, we could safely say that there is no God and, much the same thing, that the world itself is utterly irrational, unresponsive to our needs and our quest for meaning.
What we call heaven and hell are two states, two modes of existence, that correspond to these easily imagined, though on earth never fully encountered, extremes. If every prayer were answered, we would be in heaven. Every prayer unheeded is our name for hell.
Though we can imagine both—perhaps “posit” is the better word as accurate images fail us—we know that we are neither in heaven nor hell. No, we sail between two shoals in life. The world responds to some of our hopes and desires but not to all.
We are not God. Easily said but difficult to digest. Children only learn that they are children when they have been denied, been told no. The same is true of us. We are not God. At best, we are the children of God. At worst, we are orphans who never had a parent.
The first answer was negative: We are not God. The second answer is a positive statement regarding our identity. We are those who cannot stop hoping, trusting. Put another way, we cannot stop looking for meaning. It is written into our DNA.
We are not God. Easily said but difficult to digest. Children only learn that they are children when they have been denied, been told no.
C. S. Lewis thought that this was a great clue to the question of God. If all hope, all search for meaning were in vain, then the world would not simply exist without God. It would be something malign, truly evil in its own right. Why? Because evolution raises cravings in all species, desires which it meets. The sun nourishes plants; they in turn feed animals. But if there is no God, then we are the first and only creatures to desire what a randomly evolved world can never give: a meaningful existence.
Because we search for meaning like fish look for water, we will always seek to explain the ways of God and men. The word we use for this search is faith.
Faith, like hope, exists in all of us. What truly separates believers from so-called non-believers is the question of whether history offers a support or reason for faith. Those who accept revelation have judged that it does.
Faith cannot stop looking for meaning. It seeks to understand, to explain God’s response. Maybe God is angry or the prayer itself was inappropriate or the response is delayed. As the years and then the decades pass, we either affirm, reject or simply forget the answers our unanswered prayers prompted.
There is another important role of faith: rejecting inadequate answers. Often, as time passes, we realize how shallow our first answers were. They must be revised. Faith needs to be ferocious, relentless. Otherwise, it settles for something less than the truth, less than God. Remember, we do not know the final answers to our questions. Only God does.
So we have two truths, both obvious and therefore easily ignored. We are not God, and we do not know all that we would want to know.
There is a third truth, but it might better be called a talisman, because it answers nothing yet retains an air of truth. It is only a clue, if indeed the universe does speak to us. It is Christ Jesus upon the cross.
The crucified messiah is the black hole of meaning, swallowing every question it encounters. Can there be a God who denies not only us but the very Son of Righteousness? Can the Father allow Christ to be crucified and remain what we would recognize as God: the fullness of goodness, truth, beauty and love? Is there a new world, a new we, on the other side of such a cosmic chasm?
If all the unanswered prayers, all the frustrated hopes, die on Calvary only to be reborn, then this world is more meaningful, more beautiful and more loving than we ever could have hoped. But that is a big “if.” We can all agree on that.
It is also, at least for some of us, the most beautiful “if” we have ever encountered. So now we have a new question. Is the world beautiful or not?
