God in our Midst
Preacher: Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendia, Apostolic Nuncio to Great Britain
Readings: Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Mark 10:2-16
Dear brothers and sisters, I am very happy to preach today at St Salvador’s Chapel in this prestigious University of St Andrews. To each of you I bring the blessing and greeting of the Holy Father Pope Francis, who wishes to manifest his closeness to all men and women of good will in these lands. In particular, I would like to thank your Chaplain, the Rev. Dr. Donald MacEwan, for his kind invitation and for the passages of Holy Scripture chosen for today’s Sermon, so controversial and difficult!
- The first reading was taken from the Book of Job, a poetic account of Old Testament wisdom literature. The Book of Job is well-constructed, even if it suffers from certain repetitions and long-windedness typical of the Eastern style. It has a prologue and epilogue and three well-defined parts: Job’s suffering, his dialogue with his friends, and God’s response. It addresses several crucial existential and theological themes. The problem of evil and suffering, in particular how it affects righteous and upright people. For the Old Testament mentality, evil was explained as a punishment from God, not as the consequence of our full inclusion in the natural and biological processes, that leads human beings to fall ill or suffer.
The book of Job does not give a precise answer to these issues, but points to the incommensurability of God, to his plan of love before which, sooner or later, we have no choice but to bow down and accept.
The verses just read from this account present Satan, the rebellious and fallen angel, the perennial adversary of mankind, the cunning tempter, as the immediate cause of Job’s suffering. His figure in this biblical context is different from how it will often be conceived in later theology. He performs, we might say, the “fiscal work” before the divine tribunal. He does not act independently, but with the approval of God, who allows temptation, but does not provoke it. His thesis is simple: Job is good because things went well for him, but if he were subjected to trials he would curse his Creator. This approach, and the subsequent reflection of Job’s friends, still challenges our conceptions of suffering, justice and our relationship with God. Man is always trying to discover the why and the meaning of what happens to him, but Job, as a prefiguration of Christ the Redeemer, does not curse God, even though most mortals would have done so, and for much less in fact they do.
The problem of retribution, which for Old Testament theology had been resolved with the axiom: God rewards the good and punishes the wicked in this life (Ez. 18), enters into crisis in the reflection of Wisdom: not all the good are rewarded nor all the wicked punished. Job does not deny earthly retribution, indeed he expects it, but the answer to his expectations will only come from Jesus Christ and the life that awaits us after death.
- The Holy Father recently observed that (I quote):
“Jesus does not explain suffering, but he leans towards those who suffer. He does not approach pain with generic encouragement and sterile consolation, but welcomes their plight, letting himself be touched by it. Sacred Scripture is enlightening in this sense: it does not leave us a handbook of good words or a recipe book of sentiments, but shows us faces, encounters, and concrete stories. Let us think of Job, with his friends’ temptation to articulate religious theories linking suffering with divine punishment; but they collide with the reality of pain, witnessed by Job’s own life. Thus, Jesus’ response is vital; it is one of compassion that assumes and, by assuming, saves man and transfigures his pain. Christ transformed our pain by making it his own to the core: by inhabiting it, suffering it and offering it as a gift of love…
Therefore, through the experience of suffering and illness, we, as the Church, are called to walk together with all, in Christian and human solidarity, opening up opportunities for dialogue and hope in the name of our common frailty. The parable of the Good Samaritan “shows us how a community can be rebuilt by men and women who identify with the vulnerability of others, who reject the creation of a society of exclusion, and act instead as neighbours, lifting up and rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good (Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, 67)”[1] (end of quotation).
- The Gospel text that has just been proclaimed confronts us with a major issue that has many consequences: the failure of the life project that a man and a woman make when they marry. The Pharisees present to Jesus a legal question. He responds on a deeper, more existential level: it is the hardness of the human heart, selfishness, the reason why Moses allowed the oath of eternal love made by lovers to be broken by divorce. The controversy is not new and has been raised many times, particularly in some cultures, as well as in some Christian denominations, that consider marriage a contract and not a true sacrament that transmits Christ’s saving grace. In that context, marriage can be dissolved if it fails, but Pope Francis reminds us in his Encyclical ‘Amoris Laetitia’, (I quote):
“Christian marriage, as a reflection of the union between Christ and his Church, is fully realised in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful and exclusive love, who belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life, and are consecrated by the sacrament, which grants them the grace to become a domestic church and a leaven of new life for society. [Nevertheless, the divorced and civilly remarried] need to feel not as excommunicated members of the Church, but instead as living members, able to live and grow in the Church and experience her as a mother who welcomes them always, who takes care of them with affection and encourages them along the path of life and the Gospel. This integration is also needed in the care and Christian upbringing of their children, who ought to be considered most important”[2] (end of quotation).
- The passage of the proclaimed Gospel ends with one of the most tender scenes of our Redeemer’s teaching, which also concerns the respect and consideration we must have for the little ones. Children, today as over-protected as they were in ancient cultures exploited and abused, are set as an example by Him: ‘The kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are like children’: innocent, spontaneous, ignorant, despised, whose notice counts for nothing. They are the opposite of the wise Pharisees who had posed the legal question to the Lord in order to catch him off guard. Jesus responds, even to the exaggerated zeal of the disciples who want to drive away the troublesome little ones, because it is precisely in simplicity where truth is found and the Lord’s mercy is most evident.
I would like to conclude by turning our gaze to the fullness of grace, to her who, with the same simplicity and trust of children, was able to entrust herself to God’s will and thus bring us salvation: to Mary, Mother of Jesus and our Mother. She intercedes for us in the midst of our miseries and waits to receive us with her Divine Son at the end of our pilgrimage in this world. Amen.
[1] Pope Francis, Address to the Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Consistory Hall, 11 April, 2024.
[2] Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (2016), 292 and 299.