Христос исцеляет раны в земном времени, даруя людям дар сострадания

A Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time Readings: Jeremiah 20:7-9 Romans 12:1-2 Matthew 16:21-27 They say that time heals all wounds. Like most bits of folk wisdom, that is both true and false. It is largely true. If we could go back in time and revisit most of our injuries—back then, they appeared so grievous—we would find that they have passed from memory faster than we had supposed possible: Your spouse did something a year ago; a friend said something last month; last week you thought a stranger was quite rude. All these abrasions, and countless more, have been buried by time. When death takes someone whom we love, we think the heart will never heal. But most deaths, however hard they are to receive, are nonetheless expected. We understand them to be, as we say, part of life. Time does not erase the loss, but it does soothe the sorrow. This is the very nature of time, not as it is told on the face of a clock or calendar, but as we experience it in our daily lives. Whatever our losses, whatever the retreats, we move steadily forward, grasping in need for what God most often grants. (For we forget our blessings as quickly as we do our wounds.) We move through time, treading toward a notion of a wholeness that beckons us. Our health declines as we grow old, but our spirits expand. If we have cooperated with time, responded to it as a grace, we have grown more patient, more accepting. Our understanding of what we can expect from the world and what we can give to it has deepened. How do we know this? Would we go back and be, say, 21 again? We would gladly return our bodies to that point in time, but who among us would trade back his or her soul, matured at such a cost? Who would sacrifice the lessons learned, the growth in our own humanity? Time weathers the body, but it ripens the soul. If you would discard that fruit, the very grace of time has been lost on you. But now consider some wound that has never healed. These are rare, even singular: the death that makes no more sense today than it did then; the loss of a farm, business or career; the divorce that still chafes your soul; the alcoholism of a parent, who drank your hope away; the suicide you still blame on yourself. Time does not heal all wounds. We circle back on some of them in memory, hoping that some insight will come, some new form of acceptance. But there it is. Years later, the old injury is like a severed limb that cannot grow back. What was lost cannot be restored, and time has offered no substitute. These are the wounds we will carry into the presence of Christ. And there, in the instant we call eternity, when we set our eyes upon the Lord, they will be comprehensible to us. We will know that they had to be, that they were always part of who we were meant to be in the loving designs of God. But there is a great chasm between the slow maturation of time and the sudden wholeness that is eternity. It is the difference between the part and the whole, the spot we occupy and the horizon toward which we tread. It is what separates the human from the divine, even if we only know the latter by acute awareness of our own indigence. Time does not heal all wounds. Some are implanted in time. They remain with us as long as time itself, all the days of our lives, as we say. What can God in his wholeness, his blessedness, his tranquility, know of these wounds, the abrasions of time itself? Writing on the virtue of humility, St. Bernard of Clairvaux said that we can never know who we really are without first coming to know those around us. We need to know their wounds, for as he puts it, “the healthy man does not know what the sick man feels.” Pondering our shared wounds of time, St. Bernard then realized something essential about Christ. He does not wait until we pass into eternity to succor our injuries. No, he bears our wounds in time, as we do. St. Bernard wrote: But to have a heart which is sad because of someone else’s wretchedness you must first recognize your neighbor’s mind in your own and understand from your own experience how you can help him. We have an example in our Savior. He wanted to suffer so that he should know how to suffer with us (Heb 2:17), to become wretched so that he could learn mercy, as it is written, “He learned obedience from the things he suffered” (Heb 5:8). He learned mercy in the same way. It is not that he did not know how to be merciful before. His mercy is from everlasting to everlasting (Ps 103:17). But what he knew by nature from eternity he learned from experience in time (On Humility and Pride, III.6). In eternity, our fractures and wounds will appear as beginnings and births. When we see as God sees, we will know this. In the meantime, we must imitate our Lord who, St. Bernard says, “began to know by learning in the flesh of time, the mercy he had known in another way in his divinity from eternity” (III.10). Our woundedness remains. So it must be. The question is whether our wounds open us to others, allow us to see their suffering, give us what can only be nurtured in time by grace, what Christ himself gained in what he suffered: the gift of compassion, a suffering with.