Lord, Why Do This To Us?

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Course 2024

As our prayer group looked at the Scriptures we have just heard, one member asked, “Isn’t this Isaiah reading something from Good Friday?” And she was right. This is one of Isaiah’s “Servant songs” describing what we know as the prophesied sufferings of the Messiah. Jesus gave His life for us, but only after He submitted to multiple tortures. Most mature men, and many women, can verify that one of the most unendurable pains in the body is pulling out facial hair. And if something you do gets you into a lot of pain, you are often confused. Why such a terrible response? What did I do to these people. Moreover, in the case of Our Lord Jesus Christ, all He ever did to His people were things to help those people: healings, teaching, feeding, and even the suffering they imposed on Him. And, as Isaiah wrote, the Lord God, Our Father, found Him not guilty and helped Him by raising Jesus from the dead.

Moreover, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross has earned forgiveness for us and for every human on earth. That is, for all who turn to Him in faith and ask for that forgiveness. God hears our prayers of repentance, always inclines the Divine ear to us and restores and preserves our spiritual health. Because we have been incorporated into Christ’s Body, His Church, we can look forward to being delivered from death and, in the resurrection, be given the gift of immortality God wanted for us in the beginning. We will have what St. Paul calls “spiritual bodies” like that of Christ and all the resurrected saints. We will walk before the Lord, as our psalm sang, in the land of the living.

However, meanwhile back on earth, before those wonderful transformations of the Last Days, we dwell in bodies prone to illness and accident, with souls still weakened from the Fall, minds often distracted by both good things and bad. And we follow a Master who not only predicted His own passion and death, but also told us who would follow Him that each of us must deny himself, take up our own cross and then follow. We are, here in this life, participants in what J.R.R. Tolkien called “a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

If you, like me, have circled the sun with this planet more than twenty times or so, you have undergone defeats like life-threatening illness and serious accident, lost loves, failed exams, lost elections. The list seems endless. In the end, we all get to die, hopefully retaining faith in our Lord. This life we call a “valley of tears.” Our lives are like a journey on a path with stumbling blocks and deep holes we can fall into. Some have trouble believing in a God who can allow that, don’t they? If a child gets sick and dies, or a spouse suffers a violent attack, or another evil stops us in our tracks, we can ask “Lord, why do this to us?” Here’s an answer that relies on the everlasting good that came from the murder of Jesus Christ. Then, the greatest good came from the greatest evil, and continues to bear fruit two thousand years later.

Look at the Scriptures, the various Passion accounts. Ask, what did Jesus do on the cross? He forgave and prayed. He committed His dying to His Father. When Jesus was in the deepest physical hole of His life, He looked up to heaven and prayed. We all know that when we are in these moral or spiritual or physical holes, there is no place to look but up. We are literally driven to prayer.

Christians do not automatically pray always, even though Jesus told us to do that. When we are tooling along on level ground, with no obstacles, adequate income, everybody in the family satisfied, it’s sad that for most of us, our prayer is either on hold or reads “Lord, please just let the good times roll.” When we fall into the hole, lose a job, suffer illness or accident, lose a loved one, then we look for God, and do it all the time until the problem is solved.

So in response to Christ’s challenge today, perhaps we need most to embrace the crosses we are given. Pray for the grace not only to endure, but to work through those bad times faithfully following the Master in His passion and death. Why? Because we believe in Christ’s Resurrection, and in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.