Lazarus and the Problem of Evil

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother [and my sister] would not have died.”

            John 11: 32

I had prayed for James Foley, the American journalist who had been abducted by ISIS in Syria. And for Kayla Mueller, the American human rights worker who had been volunteering in Syria with Doctors Without Borders. When I heard the news that they had been killed, I felt like my own brother and sister had died.  “Lord, if you had been here . . .” Why does our all powerful and all loving God permit such evil to exist?

God gives us free will to choose goodness over darkness. Some choose the darkness and as a result bad things — evil things — happen. The consequences of those choices create a nightmare for us. But in God’s reality they represent only a microsecond in time compared to the eternity that awaits us.

Look at Sunday’s Gospel: Lazarus lay dead in a tomb for four days. His sisters cannot understand how their best friend Jesus, the miracle worker, could have let it happen. In the end Jesus brings Lazarus back to life and those four days of sorrow become a distant, faded memory compared to the joy of being reunited.

And that is how it will be for us. The pain felt by Martha and Mary is like the pain we experience in dealing with the presence of evil in our world. But in God’s eye it is temporary — like the four days that Lazarus lay dead in the tomb. There is so very much more that God has waiting for us.

The cross, the symbol of our faith, is God’s answer to the problem of evil. In the center of the cross, in the center of the pain and the suffering, we find God in human form. The message of the cross is hope. It tells us that we are not alone, that God is with us in the pain and the suffering; and someday it will all make sense, there will be a resurrection.

And all the people we have lost in our lives, perhaps our parents, perhaps our children; all those who have been dear to us; and all the James Foleys and Kayla Muellers will share with us in the joy of God’s presence for all eternity.

In the face of the evil we are confronted with each day, let us be at peace in the knowledge that God is always with us, holding our hand, leading us to a place where there will be no more pain, no more suffering and no more darkness.

5^th Sunday of Lent, Cycle A

http://www.deaconlex.blogspot.com

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Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/

Blindness and the Pool of Siloam

This Sunday’s Gospel has Jesus curing a blind man. It’s a wonderful story. The appeal is in the magic, the joy, the miracle that happens; but that’s not the end of it. As we hear in the Gospel, things get pretty complicated for that man.

Jesus brings him out of darkness for a purpose. He sends him into action: “Go wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means, 'the one who has been sent'). The Gospel writer doesn’t tell us the man’s name. Maybe he’s meant to be you and me.

Where Jesus used spit and mud to give sight to the blind man, he uses the Gospel — handed down through the centuries — to give sight to us. But once we are brought into the light, our life too can get complicated. For the Gospel calls us to action - maybe even to make changes very close to home.         

Seeing by the light of the Gospel, how can we fail to recognize Christ in the relative or friend whom we haven’t forgiven or spoken to for years over some incident that maybe we can’t even remember? And once we do see, what action do we take?

Seeing by the light of the Gospel, how do we miss the Christ standing in the shadows who listens and watches with sadness as we buy into gossip or bullying; as we condone, by our silence, the racially or ethnically degrading joke, the anti-Semitic or homophobic remark? And once we do see, what action do we take?

Once we recognize conflict between our life and the Gospel we are called to act. To fail to do so is to pretend not to see. And everyone knows that, thanks to Jesus, we Christians can now see.

As we continue our journey through Lent, let us examine our life by the light of the Gospel; and where we see that change is needed, let us go wash ourselves in the pool of Siloam and then come back to truly love one another as God loves each and every one of us.

4^th Sunday of Lent, Cycle A

http://www.deaconlex.blogspot.com

………………………………………………………………………………..

Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/

The Woman at the Well

This Sunday’s Gospel has Jesus reaching out to a social outcast within a land of social outcasts. The encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well happens in Samaria. It is a place that the Jewish people avoided like the plague. They saw the Samaritans as ritually unclean; too polluted for respectable, God-fearing people to be around.

Yet Jesus goes into this place, sits down at a well and carries on a conversation with an unaccompanied woman. In those days, and particularly in that part of the world a woman out by herself was considered an outcast even by her own people.

But this woman has bigger issues. She’s been married five times and is now living with a sixth person. Her own people look down upon her and, from her conversation with Jesus, it is apparent that she has little self-esteem.

Despite her lifestyle and self-alienation, Jesus reaches out to her and offers her living water, the presence of God. And this woman, this social outcast, this sinner, recognizes and accepts Jesus as Lord; while his own people, the upstanding people of the Mosaic Law do not. And she is so moved that she runs back to her village to bring her fellow outcasts to meet him.

Society, and our institutional structures and sadly maybe even our own families, sometimes throw people out; sometimes it's other people, sometimes it's even ourselves.

And maybe we buy into it; we see ourselves, and others, as unworthy of God's love – because we or they are different, because we or they don't quite fit in. But even then, God comes into our darkest places to find us and to give us the living water of his love - like he did for that Samaritan woman in today’s gospel.

As we continue our journey through Lent, let us recognize that in spite of our bad choices, our mistakes and even our sins, God loves us very much. And let us go out into the Samarias of our own life, and love and accept others as God loves and accepts us.

                                                                                3^rd Sunday of Lent

http://www.deaconlex.blogspot.com

………………………………………………………………………………..

Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/