When Catastrophes Happen, Whom Do We Blame?

Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time 2025

What has happened so that the prophet Joel tells the priests of the Jerusalem temple to weep and wail? Why is the house of God deprived of grain offering and wine offering? If we look not here in chapter 2 of the prophecy, but go back to chapter 1, we find that Joel and all the other farmers of the land have lost their whole crops of grapes and wheat to a massive army of locusts. The horde of pests devoured everything, even stripping bark from the olive trees.

So Joel orders the priests to proclaim a fast, not at least because the catastrophe has done damage to the food supply. But Joel has been told by the Lord why this tragedy afflicted his people. This is the true Day of the Lord, striking because of the gross sins of the people, and it has come not as a day of joy and celebration, but as a day calling for repentance and prayer for relief. He even tells the priests to sleep in sackcloth. If you have ever felt the material that contains a bushel of potatoes, you know wearing it is true penance.

When something really bad happens, we look for a scapegoat to take the blame. For lots of troubles, our response is to blame God, praying “why did you do this to us, Lord?” That’s exactly wrong. God loves us, so much that He sent His only-begotten, Jesus, to live and die and rise and ascend so that He could change us into His true images. Joel had it right: blame our sin, our rejection of God’s perfect Law. As we prayed in the psalm, the Lord will judge the world with justice and love, and will always be fair, even when we don’t feel it.

Jesus faces people who not only blame God for things, but also blame Jesus, when He does good for the possessed, for doing it with the power of demons. Jesus puts down that stupidity with perfect logic. If Jesus works with the devil to drive out devils, then the devil is working against his own evil purposes. And, He adds with a pinch of sarcasm, if I do that, how do your own people drive out devils? Then Jesus turns the whole incident into an occasion for a sermon. He tells them, “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.”

And then Jesus adds a caution that seems to me to say, “if you are freed from some vicious habit or obsession, make sure to fill yourself with God’s truth and goodness, or the emptiness in your soul will make it possible for Satan to fill the vacuum with even worse thoughts and habits.” When we repent and are healed by the Lord, it’s time to spend our free time not in web surfing and video games, but in spiritual reading, especially of the Scriptures, in doing good for the poor and in more intercessory prayer for others as well as ourselves. We pray that all in the grip of evil will be released and dedicate themselves to goodness and Truth.