A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. (Lk 6:20-23)
Find today’s readings here.
It is no fun getting assigned the Scripture reflection for Sept. 11. It’s a day to treat with somber reverence, when silence seems the wisest recourse, not scrambling around seeking insight in a biblical passage for the darkness that will forever be associated with this day. But here we are. Sept. 11 again.
If I am lucky, I will get to agonize over appropriate memorials for many more of them. But who can say? In the end, we will not know the hour nor the time.
Is it insensitive or merely trite to point out that the people going about their business on the morning of Sept. 11 had no way of knowing the horror that was about to befall them? I guess that is partly the reason that in scripture we are so frequently urged to stay alert, make ready, be prepared.
In today’s first reading, Paul adds something else: He tells those who are unmarried or contemplating a divorce, don’t bother; hold steady.
“So this is what I think best because of the present distress:
that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is.”
He doesn’t say what the present distress is—whether it is the result of persecution of the young community, a bad economy, poor local governance or intercommunal disharmony. He was probably referring to a kind of broad dis-ease that would be familiar to us in our modern times. There is plenty “present distress” to go around.
But Paul does seem pretty confident that his world is on the verge of an end, its “passing away.” Not something we are as certain of anymore (and lo, how wrong we could be). His advice is to sit tight and remain as you are; an end is coming that will wipe away all worldly cares and ambitions and desire and suffering. No need to create more complications and entanglements now. Something vastly greater rushes toward us. The early church often lived as though the end-times were just around the corner.
Each of us faces an end time of our own, even if it won’t be part of an apocalypse that envelops all humanity. Maybe it will be part of a small intimation of the apocalypse, one authored by death-dealers nurturing a warping fury that renders them indifferent to life, even their own, nurturing grievances beyond our times and small powers to address, ones hardly understood by everyday people going about their everyday lives.
On an anniversary like Sept. 11, it is so hard to hear how those who are weeping will one day laugh, how “blessed” it is when others hate you “on account of the Son of Man,” how we should rejoice and leap for joy on the day such deep grievances are paid off. Who can think of reward in heaven when the weight of our loss on earth feels so heavy?
Maybe that is something for the Sept. 12s that lie ahead to take up.
Leave it to the creator of the universe to gladden the sorrowful, to restore a place where laughter and joy again prevail. For today, let us remember the falling towers and that choking ash and those desperate prayers and ask what in justice and hope and mercy remains to do about it all.
