Some
years ago a woman I worked with asked me to pray for her little granddaughter
who had just been diagnosed with a rapidly spreading cancer. She was in
anguish, I felt so bad. And so I began to pray, trying to muster the correct
words that would render my request to the Lord most urgent and irresistible, it was
if I were trying to wrestle God to the floor with the insistence of my
pleading. And then a quiet insight - I didn’t need to get Jesus’ attention,
remind what was wrong, he knew perfectly well what the matter was. He had
noticed. Jesus too was heartbroken that this little girl was suffering. I
needed to trust him, fall into his desire. Everything changed. Prayer became a
privileged joining with him in his desire for all that his good. Somehow prayer
took on new depth. Praying would allow me to participate in the broken
heartedness of the God who always, always notices. The God who keeps an eye on
falling sparrows, the God who has the up-to-the-minute count of the hairs on my
head.
“I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt… I
have heard them crying out because of their oppressors; and I know well what
they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them.” So very long ago, God had spoken
these words to Moses at the burning bush. And in the fullness of time, this loving regard of God for his
people becomes flesh and blood reality in the person of Jesus. He comes to renew their covenant relationship with the
Father, to remind them who they are, to whom they belong. And if
the Old Testament is indeed an “unfinished symphony,” we see that Jesus in his
compassion is its long-awaited fulfillment.
And
so this morning as Jesus looks upon the poor, those too often underfed and
chronically unemployed individuals who follow him, his heart is moved with pity; literally his
guts are wrenched by what he sees. They are abandoned sheep who
desperately need a shepherd but remain outsiders because callous
religious leaders multiply rules and regulations that assure their exclusion.
This infuriates Jesus. This is why he will turn over moneychangers’ tables, why
he will call Scribes and Pharisees a brood of vipers. Jesus demands a higher
grace, that will allow the inbreaking of God’s reign.
It
is this compassion that fires his ministry. Jesus is this great surge of God’s
broken-hearted mercy rushing in with a relentless, astoundingly gentle but
ferocious urgency and energy. This is how he heals, how he feeds vast crowds,
how he preaches. With every fiber of his flesh and blood, Jesus expresses the
divine empathy that God is. In Christ, our flesh is his flesh, our pain is his
pain. And so
mercy gushes forth from Jesus’ heart; he can’t hold it back.
My
brothers and sisters, if the Gospel this morning makes it clear that Jesus is
deeply affected by what he sees, we can do no less. “So many, too many must be
brought home to the Father. Do pray for harvest-gatherers,” Jesus pleads. He
desires that we notice as he does and have our hearts broken open. Without this
compassionate notice, without this punch in our gut, all our prayer will be
indifferent and ultimately worthless. All prayer, whether explicitly intercessory or in deepest contemplation, begins in this heartfelt,
mercy-filled gaze of Jesus upon his people, upon each of us. Prayer can never
be some esoteric disembodied exercise but is always incarnational, grounded in the
reality of the crucified humanity of Christ, grounded in passion and an
anguished cry, an urgent pleading that rises from the abyss of our neediness,
our unknowing and our vulnerability. No matter where it ends, this where our prayer begins. For then we open a door onto a vast empty
space that only Christ can fill.
Maybe one old lay brother got it right, Brother Patrick Callaly.
We are told that he was often seen rummaging through the trash barrels looking for
newspapers. What on earth for? He wanted names,
real flesh and blood stories of pain and sorrow to fuel his prayer. Unless we
allow our hearts like his to be affected by all we all we know of our broken
world, of our own broken hearts, all the painful stories that we have come to
know about one another; unless we are ready to somehow hold all of this, we will be
useless at prayer, our striving for contemplation will be a total sham.
Praying with hearts so affected and transformed by compassion, our prayer will be too expansive, too radiant to be confined within the walls of this enclosure. Then it will reach out and touch and heal far beyond. We dare to believe in this hidden apostolic fruitfulness of our lives in this monastery.
As Paul assures us, while we were still helpless sinners, Christ endured the passion, the piercing of his heart, to reveal that the omnipotence of God’s love is revealed in the helplessness of his suffering, with the desire to transform it by being deeply affected by it. All because love is stronger than death.
People go through things, each of us have been through a lot. What broke Jesus’ heart? What has broken your heart? Notice. That’s where our prayer begins. As we hunger for him, so the world longs for him though they may not realize it. Let us allow him to gaze on us and feed us.
Today's homily by one of our monks.
