Friends
Peace be with you.
With everything happening in Ukraine right now, I started thinking about this question: What’s the first experience of real life violence you experienced or saw? It happened for me when I was in Israel. In the Fall of the year 2000, fighting broke out between Israelis and Palestinians and that was the semester I lived in Israel. We were repeatedly told that we were safe but there was one day when there was a car bomb close to a coffee shop we would frequent and one day when a gunfire fight was happening in the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem, which was located a quarter mile at most away from where we lived. We could hear the gunshots and sheltered in place until the fighting moved outside the Old Walled City. Still, I think I was able to feel a little sheltered from the violence because it wasn’t my home, it was Israel, someone else’s home. That’s why I was relieved when we got back to a very cold St. Paul Winter in 2000. Little did I know that, just 8 months later, I would walk out of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of our seminary and see the secretary at the front desk with a TV sitting in front of her watching the news because an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center and they weren’t sure what was going on. We would later, of course, find out all the details of September 11, 2001, in which terror struck in this country, violence that was much closer to home. Or, even in more recent years, when there were racial protests with rioting and looting happening in St. Louis and St. Paul, that’s getting really close to home. Still, I’m guessing with all of this, we feel kind of okay living in this small town that probably isn’t going to be the target of a terrorist attack or isn’t going to have such deep seated racial issues that it boils over into protests with rioting and looting.
In the Gospel, it appears that people were developing theories for why bad things were happening to their neighbors. There were people living in the northern part of Israel, in Galilee, in the part that contains the towns of Nazareth and Capernaum and Caesarea Phillippi, who were killed by Herod and their blood was mingled with the sacrifice in the Temple. Now, this would be a horrible abomination for the Jews: to have the animal sacrifice they’re offering to God to pay back the most high for their sins be mingled with the blood of people. One way to make sense of it is to say that the people who were killed were terrible sinners and they deserved exactly what they got. Or, the Tower of Siloam, which was probably located right next to a pool the people would have gone to in order to bathe and be made ritually pure in order to be able to enter the Temple and other holy places, when it collapsed and killed people they said that it happened because the people killed were such terrible sinners they didn’t deserve to be cleansed. It’s like there are good people who deserve to be forgiven if they make a mistake and there are bad people who are evil and cannot ever be forgiven, which is proved by the terrible things that happen to them.
I’m guessing we’ve all taken pleasure at seeing other people get punished. It’s March Madness, and, if you watch college basketball, you’re counting on at least one upset of a big ranked team. We love to see a Duke or Arizona or Kansas get beaten. When it happens, there’s something satisfying about it. I’ve mentioned in other homilies that there’s actually a German word for this called schadenfreude, meaning happiness at the misfortune of others. Mr. Recker reminded me this week at a meeting about this concept. I think many of us like to see powerful people or vengeful people or arrogant people get their comeuppance.
Still, let’s listen carefully to Jesus’ parable today about the fig tree. There’s a fig tree that hasn’t produced fruit for three years. The owner of the farm wants to cut it down because it’s just taking up space. But the gardener wants to give it one more year, basically one more try, and then, if it doesn’t produce figs, cut it down. I think the message Jesus is telling us is that if we think bad things happen to bad people and we think the fact that bad things haven’t happened to us is proof that we are good, we’re being delusional. How are we going to handle it when bad things happen to us? Just because something bad had has happened to someone else hasn’t happened to us doesn’t mean in never will.
The struggle with all of this is that the people make such a strong connection between other people’s personal sins and their suffering, people suffer because they are bad. The truth is that personal suffering can be redemptive. It can help us grow if looked at in the right perspective. At the men’s conference, one of the speakers talked about how there was tension between the people of Poland and the People of Ukraine because of a genocide that happened between 1942-1945. But, today, as refugees fleeing Ukraine have entered this place in which their ancestors once committed genocide, they are being welcomed into people’s homes and into public facilities such that they have not had to set up a refugee camp. God is using the suffering of the Ukrainian people to heal the wounds between some Polish people and some Ukrainian people. It doesn’t mean the war is good or the fact that the Ukrainian people are becoming refugees is good but, even from those evils, God can make something good happen.
We must be a people of forgiveness and reconciliation. Admitting when we’ve made a mistake and owning up to it is crucial to the life of grace. Apologizing to the person against whom you have sinned is part of this but going to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and confessing your sins to receive forgiveness is also important. Hopefully it won’t take a tower collapsing on us or being killed by a political despot to help us see God working even if our suffering but we know that there’s always some kind of redemptive suffering in our lives. The challenge is if we can connect that suffering to Christ’s life by striving to be like him, meaning humble and forgiving, instead of striving to be vengeful and hateful as the world and the evil one always tempts us to be.
