1st Sunday of Lent 2023

This week we marked the first anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine. In that year, the war took over 100,000 lives, destroyed millions of dollars in property, and inflicted untold environmental damage. A strong aftershock rattled parts of Turkey and Syria this week, ruining more buildings and taking additional lives in a region already devastated by a major earthquake just a few weeks ago. 

Combine those major catastrophes with the smaller personal disasters like a child receiving a cancer diagnosis, financial setbacks, or family discord, and sometimes God doesn’t seem to make sense. We can’t help but ask ourselves how can a loving, compassionate God allow this to happen. It just doesn’t seem to make sense.

Today, as we begin the Lenten Season, I will start a series of homilies on “When God Doesn’t Make Sense.” We’ll look at those times when God says “no,” and it seems impossible to understand why. We’ll look at situations where we fervently prayed for God to bring a loved one healing or relief from hardship, but God seemingly ignored us. 

These situations often cause people to give up on God, stop attending church, and cease praying. If you have ever felt that way, and I believe we all have, it is good you are here today, and I hope you will make a point of attending all the weeks of Lent. If you do have to miss a weekend, remember we archive the livestream of our Mass, and you can watch it on our website, www.holyredeemerchatham.org. Maybe you know someone among your family, friends, and neighbors who struggles with this issue. Invite them to come to church with you during Lent.

I want to make three points about our struggle with God not making sense. First, it makes sense that God doesn’t make sense because God is all-wise and all-knowing. Our human wisdom is limited, but God has been around for all eternity. God has the big picture. Yes, humans have existed for tens of thousands of years, but even that is only a relatively short amount of the Earth’s existence. When we consider the history of creation, it is even more minuscule. Our vision of history is only through a tiny window. Even with the help of modern technology and science, the universe is vast, and our insights are limited and speculative. We still know little about our world and the universe compared to God. 

My second point is that often we confuse God making no sense with the world not making sense. Not all tragedy in life is God’s will. In the Our Father, we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” We say that prayer because we know we don’t always do God’s will. There are forces of evil that hinder God’s will. Climate change is an example. Temperatures are rising, storms are increasing in intensity, and the environment is being denigrated, all contributing to suffering and pain that isn’t God’s will. The cause of so much of the world’s sorrow comes from self-serving decisions that inflict pain on innocent others. 

God can, however, make good come from evil, and we see it so often after disasters and loss. People respond with generosity to those suffering, and there are often outpourings of support and assistance for those experiencing loss. A greater sense of solidarity and community results from so many disasters. We must remember God will have God’s way at the end of time, but in the meantime, we need to be God’s instruments working together to transform the world into the Kingdom of God right now.

My third point is that we know so little about God. God is infinite, and despite being able to get to know God through prayer and scripture, we still understand very little about God. God’s ways are not ours, and there is much more to learn about God. If we believe we have to know everything there is to know about God, we are doomed to struggle with faith and condemned to live in doubt because we can never hope to know God completely. 

We can never hope to know the mind of God, but we can know the heart of God. We can understand that God is a God of compassion, love, and mercy because that is what Jesus revealed through His life and ministry. 

Our Lenten observance is about remembering how Jesus revealed God’s heart to us through His passion, death, and resurrection. These Lenten days are our time to recall a loving God who sent His only begotten son as a sacrifice for our sins. God has clearly revealed to us what we need to know: that God is love. 

Many Catholics have an academic understanding of God. They look at God as if God were a classroom subject. They know a lot about God, but they don’t know God. God does reveal God through reason, but faith can’t start and end there. Faith must begin in our hearts. We need a personal relationship with God developed through prayer and the sacraments. 

We are left still with the question, “Why does God say no to good things?” We can look at today’s first reading from the Book of Genesis to get our answer. Some people look at Genesis and its stories of creation as a fairytale. As Catholics, we don’t take Genesis literally and don’t have to believe God created the world in one week. Genesis doesn’t so much tell us about how God made the earth and human beings as it tells us why God did it. The world came about out of God’s love and desire to give. 

When God created the universe, God made it all good. There was no evil, only good; everything was perfect. God laid down only one rule, Do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God didn’t make this rule because God was jealous and wanted to keep something from our first parents. God made this rule because God didn’t want them to experience evil, only good. God wanted Adam and Eve to know only goodness. God was so good that He gave our first parents free will and blessed them with the ability to make their own decisions. God enabled them to decide for themselves whether or not to obey God’s one command.

Evil can present itself in clever ways, as we see in today’s Gospel, where it tries to tempt Jesus to misuse His powers for good in self-serving ways. In Genesis, evil manipulates Eve and gets her to claim God threatened her and Adam with death if they ate of the tree in the center of the garden, something a loving God did not do. Evil began causing Adam and Eve to doubt and question God, to steal away their trust in God. and to make them feel as if God were holding out on them. Evil began to make Adam and Eve think a sort of control freak God was holding back the fullness of life. Evil told them to give up God, go it alone, and make their own decisions. 

Suddenly, Eve was attracted to the tree and its fruit and saw it as a good food source. She fell for the promise that the tree might give her wisdom and maybe power over God. Adam and Eve gave into temptation causing evil to enter the world. Now they didn’t live with total goodness but also with sin. They had to deal with temptation and the need to choose between good and evil. They had to confront conflicting impulses. No longer could they depend on only doing good but faced choices and conflict. Their disobedience caused innocence to be lost and paradise squandered. All the choices and temptations God protected Adam and Eve from were now unleashed on them. 

God sometimes says “no” not to deny us but because God wants something even better for us. Parents especially know these circumstances. Their children want to do something they feel is good, like go to a party or other activity. As parents, you have a long view. You see, it isn’t in your child’s best interest. You recognize they are not mature enough yet, or you see possible hazards your child does not foresee. You have to say no to protect your child and their wellbeing.

Just like a good parent, God has to guide us away from what appears good so we can experience something even better. God plans to give us something even more life-giving and kingdom-building. 

None of us is alone in sometimes believing God doesn’t make sense. Everyone has had an experience where they question God’s love and concern. Those are the moments God wants to come closest to us. God is here right now and wants to give us the grace to sort out our emotions and make sense of God’s will for us. As we come forward to receive the Real Presence of Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in this Eucharist, accept God’s grace and be transformed by God’s love.