Jeremiah 17:5-8 I Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 Luke 6:17, 20-26
Alleluia, alleluia.
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke
Glory to you, Lord
Jesus came down with the twelve and stood on a stretch of level ground with a great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon. And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said:
Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Introduction
The power to murder God
In his small volume Night Elie Weisel, perhaps the most famous Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, writes of his first night in the concentration camp of Buchenwald when he saw the bodies of little children going up in smoke from the crematories.
That was the night which murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams into dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
On September 11, 2001, two 747’s as weapons of mass destruction smashed into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan bringing down not only megatons of mortar and bricks but almost 3,000 innocent human beings. On July 15, 2002, the workers and families of victims of 9/11 gathered at a Staten Island landfill to mark the end of a grueling and emotional ten-month operation. That gargantuan undertaking had hauled away 2,000,000 tons of debris. It identified only 1600 bodies out of the 2800 people killed, and it had uncovered 20,000 body-parts. Those vital statistics bespeaks the enormity of 9/11 when the tectonic plates under our feet shifted, the earth quaked and everything in our lives suddenly changed irreversibly.
After 9/11, a two-hour documentary entitled Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero was aired on PBS’s Frontline. It examined the spiritual aftershocks of September 11. It showed how that apocalyptic event confronted us not only with the problem of human evil[1] but also with `the problem of God.’ That’s the problem which all (especially believers) have in the back of their minds whenever some great disaster like the Holocaust or 9/11 or the Haiti earthquake happens. `The problem of God’ – that’s the problem which professed non-believers are quick to talk about, but which most believers are `too pious’ to bring out into the open.
In the documentary, Tim Lynston, a security guard, who lost more than thirty friends wrestled with `the problem of God.’ He said, “The whole thing was so barbaric the ways their lives were taken, that I now look on God as a barbarian, and I probably always will. I think I am a good Christian, but I have a different image of Him now, and I can’t replace it with the old one.”
Out of the rubble and ruin of 9/11 rose `the problem of God’ also for Marina Fontana. Her husband was one of the 343 firefighters who lost their lives on that infamous day. In the documentary she says, “I can’t bring myself to speak to God anymore because I feel so abandoned. I guess deep down inside I know that He still exists and that I have to forgive Him and move on. But I’m not ready to do that yet.”
There was, however, no `God-problem’ in 9/11 for Bernie Heeran. He was a retired firefighter whose son Charlie worked at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center and was killed on that fatal day. In the documentary he says, “At this stage, I have not questioned God. He had nothing to do with 9/11. God was fighting evil that day, like He does every day. And He was inviting us to help Him in the fight.”
As Americans were still reeling under 9/11, televangelist Jerry Falwell declared that that horrific event was God’s retribution on “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way.” As Haitians were still burying their loved ones without proper rituals and in mass graves, another televangelist, Pat Robinson, declared that Haiti's earthquake was God's retribution on Haitians’ for their “voodoo pact with the devil.[2]" In the darkness of such bad news preached by so-called ministers of the Gospel (the word means `Good News’) shines the good news preached by Bernie Heeran: “God had nothing to do with 9/11. God was fighting evil that day, like He does every day, and He was inviting us to help Him in the fight.”
We have `the problem of God’ on our hands again! On January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, killing 150,000, injuring 250,000, leaving 2,000,000 homeless and sending 200,000 fleeing the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Among the dead was Haitians’ beloved Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot.
On TV we daily watched Haiti’s tragedy endlessly unfold: the loud screaming because of pain and fright; the frantic digging for life; the hope-against-hope searching for loved ones buried in the rubble; the desperate scrounging for water and food; the obscene bulldozing of 75,000 bodies of loved ones into mass burial dumps; the communal jubilation whenever someone was pulled out of the rubble alive (even though 150,000 weren’t that fortunate).
For those who dare to think, there rises out of the indescribable tragedies of 9/11 or the Haitian earthquake `the problem of God.’ That’s the problem of a so-called `almighty God’ who could have, should have, but didn’t prevent the tragedies in Lower Manhattan USA or in Port-au-Prince.
Esther "Etty" Hillesum was born in Middelburg, Netherlands, in 1914, and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 30 November 1943. Etty's father and mother either died during transport to Auschwitz or were gassed immediately upon arrival. Etty was a Jewish thinker and writer. Between 1941 and 1943 she wrote letters and diaries which describe life in Amsterdam during the German occupation. She was especially a mystic who solved her problem of an `almighty God.’ In one of her diaries she writes,
Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight I lay in the dark with burning eyes as one scene of human suffering after another passes before me. Dear God, I shall try to help You stop my strength from ebbing away from me. One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that we must help You. [A so-called `almighty God’ needs no help from anyone!] In the face of man’s inhumanity to man, You cannot help us [You have no power to help us!]; we must help You. And dear God, for that I do not hold you responsible, and I forgive you. (Elizabeth O'Connor, in her book Search for Silence)
For Fr. Francis Biaocchi there is no such `creature’ as an “almighty God.” He writes,
The tragedy in Haiti is a case in point, and it confuses me: tens of thousands of extremely poor people killed in a horrible natural disaster, and more tens of thousands lying wounded and helpless. What kind of God allows this? If God is almighty and all-powerful, then why does this happen? My personal conclusion is that God is not almighty and all-powerful [italics mine]. I believe that people in the past needed to think God was almighty, so they attached that quality to God. The phrase “almighty God” still appears in many of our church prayers.[3] This “almighty God” tag is, in my opinion a human creation that does not stand up well under careful scrutiny and the test of time. God is in Haiti not as the all-powerful one, but as One who suffers and cries with the Haitian people. [4]
Like Fr. Biaocchi’s God who weeps, Fr. Pierre Teilhard’s God also weeps. Teilhard, mystic and theologian whose voice echoed through the deliberation chambers of Vatican II, writes,
It is thoroughly in accord with the Gospel to regard God across the ages as weeping over the world in ceaseless effort to spare the world its bitter sufferings and to bind up its wounds. It is impossible to conceive God in any other way, and still more impossible to love Him. (Divine Milieu)For Fr. Biaocchi God is not almighty; rather He is “One who suffers and cries with the Haitian people.” Neither is God almighty for retired NYC firefighter Bernie Heeran; rather God is One “who fights evil every day and invites us to help Him in His fight.” (An almighty God needs no help from anyone!)
A team of 20 American rescuers from New York and Virginia accepted God’s invitation to help Him in Haiti’s earthquake. With the expertise of Chris Dunic (a veteran New York fireman whose tunneling skills were forged in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center on 9/11) the rescuers managed to extricate a little Haitian boy named Kiki from a mountain of crushed masonry, after spending eight days beneath the rubble. That brought a moment of ecstatic joy for everyone amid death and despair. Of that moment John Humphry writes for his newspaper,
“No Hollywood director could have improved on the scene that was splashed across the pages of this and just about every other newspaper 24 hours ago. No reader could have turned the page without pausing, smiling, perhaps even shedding a tear. That one photograph sums up the horror of what has befallen Haiti, but it also sums up hope.
“The crushed masonry that formed the backdrop illustrated the power that created this tragedy. The determination of the rescuers who labored so mightily for so long was there too. At the centre of the picture is a little boy called Kiki. He is seven years old and he is beaming, his crooked tooth exposed in a smile as wide as his outstretched arms.
“His huge brown eyes sunk deep into his face tell of the suffering he must have endured since his world came crashing down on him eight days earlier, but the smile overshadows everything. It is directed at a stick thin woman reaching out to him -- his mother. A resurrection scene that could have been painted by Caravaggio.
“We cannot see her face, but we can see the faces of Kiki's rescuers - well-fed Americans who have left their comfortable homes in the world's richest country to dig for survivors of an earthquake in one of the world’s poorest. Mostly they find only bodies. But not this time. This is a picture of joy. It is almost biblical. Almost a resurrection scene or the raising of Lazarus that might have been painted by Caravaggio or Rembrandt. If there is one image that stays in our minds when the world's attention has moved on from Haiti it will surely be this one.
“Why should we focus so much attention on Kiki at the risk of distorting in our memories the real picture? I think it's because it answers a deep need in every one of us to believe in the nobility of humanity. The whole scene touches the core of our spirituality - even those of us who have no religion. Perhaps especially those of us who have no religion. The belief that it is possible to roll the boulder away from the tomb and overcome the cross, has endured for 2,000 years. And that is the essence of the photograph of Kiki's rescue.”
Conclusion
A Father nevertheless
Mystic Etty prayed: “Dear God, You can’t save us, and for that I do not hold you responsible, and I forgive you.” With Etty we pray: “Dear God, You always forgive us our trespasses against You. Now we dare to forgive Your trespasses against us! We forgive you for not being an almighty God – for not preventing 9/11, the Haiti earthquake and all our personal 9/11s and earthquakes.
We forgive You for being only “Our Father who art in heaven.” Yes, `only’ our Father, but a Father nevertheless, who together with all the first-responders and fire-fighters (353 of whom died in the conflagration), fought the evil of 9/11. A Father nevertheless, who together with the 20 American rescuers from New York and Virginia, was fighting the evil of an earthquake, as they raised up Kiki from his tomb of rubble. A Father nevertheless, who together with help from us, fights all our personal 9/11s and earthquakes.
[1] Islamic terrorism
[2] Voodoo is a religion originating in the Caribbean country of Haiti. It merges the beliefs and practices of West African peoples (brought as slaves to Haiti in 16th century) with Roman Catholicism. Though they converted to Catholicism, the people often held on to many traditional African beliefs.
[3] The church down through the centuries and still today opens its prayers with “Omnipotens et aeterne Deus….” – “Almighty and eternal God….”
[4] Homily of Rev. Francis Biaocchi for 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 17, 2010.
