Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Link to the Mass readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/062010.shtml

It is not often we meet God in joy. Rarely do we pull back from sin, thankful that God is by our side and we are His people. Too often we meet Him in the pain that follows. We take that step back and really see who we hurt: the friend when we have said one word too many, the lover when we have betrayed their chastity; ourselves, when our greed has left us only loneliness. It is this pain that we read about in the first reading: “and they shall look on him whom they have pierced,/ and they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only son,/ and they shall grieve over him as one grieves over a firstborn.” These verses prophecy the repentance of God’s people over the death of Christ, but all sin meets at the cross. Jesus took the pain and punishment of the sins we mourn for there, and this prophecy about God’s people speaks to our own mourning of the pain we cause there.

“O God, you are my God whom I seek;/ for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts/ like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water./ Thus have I gazed toward you in the sanctuary/ to see your power and your glory,/ For your kindness is a greater good than life.” Life without God is defined by longing. Longing for love, for satisfaction, for absolution of our lives. We are always reaching out to God, and do so even in pain. It is hard to bless God when He has not blessed us, sometimes hard to accept that in Him is a banquet where our souls shall be satisfied.

This is what faith is, that we who are baptized into Christ are heirs to the promise of salvation. There is joy in Christ, and the pain that leads to longing does find satisfaction. But Jesus himself tells us that if anyone is to follow him they must take up their own cross. Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will save it.

These are hard words for we who have hurt in our life, and want salvation to be blissful. But Christ is the narrow way. Our joy comes from the hope of His promise, from knowing that His right hand holds us up. We must cling to that, cling to the hand and to the cross and share in the pain of Christ when we hurt too. There is a balm in Gilead. It is in losing our life that we find it, in mourning that we find “a fountain to purify from sin and uncleanness.”