When I was much younger one of my
doctor friends left his wife to take up with a younger woman. He
told me that he felt bad about it, but as he explained to his wife,
God wanted him to be happy, and he was much happier with his new girl
friend than he had been with his wife. I guess a real question we
could ask ourselves is, “Does God want us to be happy?” You
might say, “not at the expense of the happiness of other people”
or some other qualifier, but I think we all sort of believe that God
is happy when we are happy.
But Today Jesus tells us that if we
want to save our lives we have to lose them, if we want to follow
him, we have to take up our cross; and even poor old Peter who said
in effect, “God forbid that anything would happen to you that would
make you unhappy,” was sharply rebuked and called Satan. Last week
Jesus called him the rock upon which he would build his church.
Today he calls him a stumbling block which is a better translation
than the word “obstacle”.
I met a lady the other day who just
had a major operation to deal with an abdominal cancer. She is not
going to be cured; the disease is too far gone. With luck, she'll
have a few months and they won't all be comfortable. And she said,
understandably, “Why me?” She is in her early fifties, her
children are off on their own, and she was looking forward to a few
years of doing things she wanted to do, traveling a little, maybe
going back to school. And she told me she prays, prays for a
miracle, prays that this nightmare will just be a bad dream.
And none of us will escape, we will
all have that day when the unthinkable happens, when we will face
something devastating. And we will ask, “Why me? Doesn't God want
me to be happy?”
Maybe today's gospel is God's answer
to this question.
Some of you are aware of Richard Rohr,
a Franciscan priest who is a prolific author of books about the
spiritual life. I don't agree with everything he says, but he does
make the interesting point that we human beings spend much of our
lives defining ourselves. This not only involves who we think we
are, but who we think we are not. As we get older that image becomes
more fleshed out, and more firm; and when anything comes along that
challenges the image we have of ourselves, we have to rebuild the
image based on the new information, or we have to ignore the new
information and cling to the image. Both take a lot of work, and
that is what we mean by suffering. And one of the consquences of
creating this image is that this is were we locate happiness as well.
Happiness is when something seems to confirm what we believe about
ourselves.
But if you are like me, and you are,
you probably know by now that getting something you really want makes
you happy for a very short time, and then you want something else. I
have a basement full of power tools and a kitchen full of gadgets,
most of which I once believed would add to my total amount of
happiness.
Saint Augustine said, “Our hearts
are restless until they rest in God” He also recognized in his
search for God that God was not to be found in external things, in
the pleasures of the world, in the occupations of the mind – while
he was searching without, he says, God was within,
Richard Rohr and probably Saint
Augustine would agree that if we really want to find happiness, if we
really want to avoid suffering, we have to recognize that the self
which we try to make happy and try to keep from suffering is not
real, it is only something we built up, and one of the tasks of
growing is to recognize this and accept it. And when we do this, we
begin to recognize that God, the God in whom I can finally rest, has
been there all along.
Jesus tells his disciples that he has
to go – he has to leave Galilee, where he has been treated like a
rock star, where he has huge crowds following him and hanging on his
every word. He has to go to Jerusalem. And he has to suffer.
Because even Jesus, Son of God though he is, is human, and like all
human beings, in order to meet God he has to undergo the pain that
comes when he confronts the fact that the image he has of himself is
not the real him. I don't think that's heresy, because the gospels
tell us that Jesus was tempted, and temptation means nothing if you
aren't attracted by that which is tempting you. I think that is why
the harsh words to Peter – because that might have been a real
temptation, and Jesus sees it as such. Jesus goes on to tell his
disiciples that he has to be killed. And perhaps for most of us that
will the point where we finally let go of that image of ourselves we
have so carefully built up through the years of our lives. Certainly
there is a kind of pain in elderly people who still see themselves as
they used to be, but no one else does.
But Jesus has one last prediction –
that he will rise again. And when Jesus rises again, he shows his
oneness with God, which for you and I and Jesus requires letting go
of ourselves and letting God raise us up.
So Jesus tells us today that if we
spend our energies looking for happiness and avoiding pain, it won 't
really work; we have to lose our lives in order to save them. And if
we want to follow Jesus into resurrection, we have to carry our
crosses through suffering and death.
So God does want us to be happy, but
he wants real happiness for us, which can only come about when we
have Him. And our hearts may be restless until they rest in God, but
we know that God's heart is restless until he gets what he wants,
which is to become one with you and I. Nothing else matters, because
as Jesus tells us, what can anyone give in exchange for his soul?
