Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time – July
4, 2021
Our society values success. As a result, failure can be hard
to accept and to deal with. Yet, it is
part of our experience. We all
understand failure in some way, to some degree. We might set out on
a certain
path and we don’t reach the destination, in spite of our best efforts. On a
moral level,
St. Paul complains: “I have the desire to do what is good, but I
cannot carry it out. For I do not
do the good I want to do, but the evil I do
not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Rom 7:18,19).
In our relationships, a
painful experience of failure is the breakdown of a relationship that had
been
very significant. Such experiences can leave us discouraged, disheartened, and
negative about
our future.
This morning’s readings reflect that experience of failure.
Jesus’ mission in his home town of
Nazareth appears to have been a failure. He
left Nazareth to go down to the Jordan River where
John the Baptist had been
baptizing. After his baptism and a period of forty days of testing in
the
wilderness, he began his public ministry of preaching, teaching and healing in
the towns and
villages of Galilee. He met with opposition from the religious
leaders, but he drew large crowds
of the people to himself, especially the
broken, the excluded, the lost. He must have gone to
Nazareth with a certain
expectation that he would be well received in his own place. He preached
in
their synagogue on the Sabbath. However, the response to him was one of cold
indifference, even
hostility. The townspeople presumed they knew him; he is the
carpenter, the son of Mary. Once
a carpenter, always a carpenter. Who does he
think he is, speaking and acting above his station?
The gospel makes a striking
statement: “Jesus could work no miracles there.” He couldn’t function
among his
own townspeople. He was disempowered by their refusal to take him seriously.
This experience
of failure must have come as a disappointment to him. Yet, it
was only a foretaste of the much more
painful experience of failure Jesus would
have to endure in the city of Jerusalem. He was despised
in Nazareth; he would
be crucified in Jerusalem.
Jesus drank the bitter cup of failure. A spiritual director
wrote: “God dealt with our failure by
becoming a failure and dealing with it
from the inside. This is why we can meet God in our failure.”
God became a
failure on Calvary, in the person of his crucified Son. There was no greater
proclamation
of failure in the world of Jesus than the act of crucifixion.
Because God has plumbed the darkest
depths of human failure, we can meet God in
our own experiences of failure. Those experiences of life
that bring home to us
our limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness are not the dead ends they
often appear to be. The Lord is powerfully with us in those moments, working to
bring something new
out of what seems very unpromising. That was the experience
of Paul in today’s second reading.
He speaks about a “thorn in the flesh” that
was given to him. We cannot be sure what he meant by this
phrase, but it was
obviously some painful experience that he could see no good in. It came into
the
category of failure. Paul thought of it as an obstacle that prevented him
from doing God’s work
successfully. He speaks of it as an expression of his
weakness. He pleaded with God to be free of it.
His prayer was heard but not in
the way that he expected. He was left with this thorn in the flesh,
but it was
revealed to him in prayer that the Lord was working powerfully in and through
this thorn
that he so desperately wanted to be free of. He heard the Lord say
to him, “My grace is enough for
you. My power is at its best in weakness.” The
very experience that he saw as of no value,
as a failure, was where the Lord
was most powerfully present. It was as if Paul came to see that just
as God was
powerfully present in the failure of Christ on the cross, so God was powerfully
present
through what Paul recognized as his failures, his powerlessness.
When we come face to face in our own lives with failure,
loss, rejection, we often need to stand back
so as to see these painful
experiences with the eyes of faith, rather than just with the eyes of our
culture, the eyes of the world. We reflect on these experiences with the
conviction that God may be
powerfully present in a life-giving way. We face our
failures, our weaknesses and our brokenness with
hope, recognizing with Saint
Paul that the Lord’s power is always at work in our weakness.
Fr. Don, cp