Star of Wonder, Star of Hope
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - December 21, 2007
One of the principal goals of the Advent season is to prepare us to embrace the Lord when and as he comes. It is not enough for us merely to await the Messiah's arrival; we must accept him on his terms upon his arrival.
That was a huge challenge for the Jews two millennia ago. The Jewish people were, for the most part, in a perpetual state of expectation for the long-awaited anointed one. Little did they expect, however, that he would be born the way he was: of an itinerant homeless woman in an animal stable rather than of famous descendents of David in a royal palace. Little did they expect him to act the way he did when he grew up: rather than wiping out the political oppressors of the Jewish people, he would suffer and be executed at their hands. Throughout his public ministry, he constantly defied expectations: many asked whether the Messiah or even "anything good could come from Nazareth;" his fellow Nazarenes also joined the chorus, reminding themselves and others that Jesus was merely "a carpenter" (Jn 1:45-46; Mk 6:3).
When the disciples of John the Baptist impatiently queried whether Jesus was the Messiah or whether they should wait for someone else, Jesus listed some of the many qualifications that the prophet Isaiah had foretold would characterize the one who is to come: he had made the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the poor receive the good news. He had even cleansed lepers and raised the dead. Then he said some of the most heartbreaking words in Sacred Scripture: "Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me" (Is 11:5-7; Mt 11:1-6).
The truth is that almost everyone would take scandal at the Messiah Jesus really was. Jesus did not meet their false expectations of who the Messiah should be and how he should act. If they were not scandalized by the conditions of his birth or upbringing, they were scandalized, rather than converted, by his deeds and words. They took offense at his befriending sinners. They resented that he would cure people on the Sabbath. They were piqued that he would call God his Father. They felt affronted at the reality of the Eucharist, and many of his disciples, in addition to the crowds, would abandon him over it (Mt 9:11; 12:10; Jn 6:66; 8:16).
But the greatest scandal of all would be his suffering and death. When Jesus first announced to the twelve that he would suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, Peter, who had just declared him to be the Messiah and Son of Living God, rebuked him, saying that he would never allow such a thing to happen to him. Jesus, in turn, rebuked Peter, called him Satan for trying to tempt him away from his mission, and said, "You are not thinking as God does, but as man" (Mt 16:16-23).
To accept Jesus as the Messiah, we must think as God does, and not according to our own categories. In God's plans, it had long been foretold through the prophet Isaiah that the Messiah would suffer, but most Jews, including the apostles, had dismissed those prophecies of the Suffering Servant just like they repeatedly did Jesus' own (Is 53). For that reason, when Jesus fulfilled those prophecies rather than their false expectations, they took offense rather than took heart.
In the deepest and most beautiful section of his recent Advent-oriented encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict said that Christ, by the mystery of his incarnation and birth, desired to show us the link between suffering and salvation not just in his life but in ours. Suffering is part of human life and stems, the Holy Father states, because of our human limitations and because of the evil caused by our sins and the sins of others stretching all the way back to the beginning. Because we are not able to eliminate our finitude or eradicate sin, we cannot banish suffering. "Only a God who personally enters history by making himself man and suffering within history" can accomplish this. This is why God became man, the Pope declares: "God — Truth and Love in person — desired to suffer for us and with us…. Man is worth so much to God that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly real way — in flesh and blood."
Rather than eliminating suffering altogether, Jesus redeemed it so that we might draw even greater good from it. He converted it from merely an ontological evil into a necessary moral good. This is we are called to pick up our cross each day and follow him, to be crucified with him so that we might live with him (Mt 16:24; Gal 2:18-20). "It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering," the pope says, "that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning [in it] through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love…. Suffering — without ceasing to be suffering — becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise."
Like Christ, we are called to enter into the lives of others and suffer for and with them. The more we learn from Christ how to bear our own crosses with faith and hope, the more we will be capable of helping others to bear theirs. "The true measure of humanity," Benedict emphasizes three times, "is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer." The suffering of others will either conform us to Christ as loving, compassionate, Good Samaritans, willing to take some of the weight of others' pain on our shoulders, or confirm us as egocentric, inhuman and selfish comfort-seekers. It will reveal us as disciples of the real Messiah, the Suffering Servant, or of a counterfeit who cannot save.
As we prepare to celebrate Christmas, Pope Benedict is reminding us that we must do more than go to meet and adore Jesus in the manger and at Mass; we must also go with him to continue his messianic mission. Just as he took on a body so that he might suffer for and with us, so we, as his mystical body, are called with him to suffer for and with others. The mystery of Christmas is that God-is-with-us, not statically, but suffering, not in plaster of Paris but in persons in pain and need. He is our "star of hope." Let us go in search of him.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
