Oil of Our Presence
Behold, behold the wood of the cross…
One of the great gifts that we have as priests
is that we anoint the sick and
to be with them in their most weak moments,
their toughest questions of life.
But there is a great challenge with that as well.
They ask really difficult questions.
Why? Why has God abandoned me?
Why does a God who claims to love us
allows such profound suffering, such profound pain?
It is particularly difficult if it is a young person
who is suffering from some disease
that is through no fault of their own.
The questions are deep, personal and painful.
My atheist friends will join in the course of these questions
and will challenge me with, “Where is your God?”
Now we have a response and it is the wood of the cross,
but my atheist friends have an answer too.
And the answer they will give to me is this:
they will say there is no God.
You see for them there is no God
and therefore the problem of evil is just life.
It just happens.
You see, they cannot blame a God that they do no thave.
Therefore they just say,
that is the capriciousness of life:
evil, good, just the way it is.
They are all constructs of our mind.
It just happens.
At first life gives a little bit of solace,
it gives a little bit of satisfaction
because in that moment of pain,
in that moment of confusion,
that moment of extraordinarily suffering,
it is sort of a relief to know then there is nothing.
But the problem with that answer is this,
it also takes away all hope.
The problem with taking away hope is
that then there is nothing to live for.
Without hope, without the eternal life on the other side,
well, it just all ends.
And believe me,
I have been there for hopeless deaths.
It is brutal.
To watch a hopeless death is one to be avoided at all costs.
See, Christianity has a response.
It may not be the answer we want,
but it does have a response.
Let me offer it to you
because it is about what happens today.
This is the response:
it says first of all that not only God recognizes
the suffering and the pain,
and he does not remain at a distance.
He enters into the suffering and the pain.
He becomes one of us, and he accompanies us.
He becomes one of us to the point of death on a cross.
Now we have to understand how brutal this was,
how lonely this suffering was for Jesus.
He was betrayed.
He was left alone, abandoned by his closest friends,
he was accused falsely then put through a sham of a trial.
He was then tortured to an inch of his death,
and then hung naked on a cross
so that he could die the most painful, slowest way possible.
And God does not stop it.
That is the hardest part of this.
Why does God not stop it?
Because he becomes one with us in our suffering,
so that we now know that our God is not a distant God.
He is a God who comes and accompanies us
in the pain and suffering of life to death on a cross.
My friends, this is not where the cross ends.
This is not the total answer of Christianity.
The total answer will be on Sunday.
The final word is the resurrection.
The final word is love wins.
The resurrection is real.
Eternal life is real.
That is the message of the wood of the cross.
Therefore what does that say to us?
I know many of you are suffering,
many of you have lost loved ones,
and you have heard me say this before.
I do not know what is harder to be the one who suffers
or to watch one who we love suffer,
but what God says he is with us.
In the end, he calls us forward to eternal life.
The final word is the resurrection.
That is the hope of the cross, my friends.
That is the real response to suffering in this world
is that God is with us.
So then what are we to do?
What are we to do in our own lives?
Because we will come across suffering.
It is to remember that there is hope beyond the cross.
There is hope in the cross, and it is in Jesus
that the message does not end with our suffering.
Number one, Jesus entered into God,
entered into our human condition
so that we would know that
we are with him in the midst of our suffering.
If you are suffering, then know
that God is with you as close as he is to his own son.
But here is what is even more important for us.
If we are not suffering ourselves,
but we know somebody is suffering,
then we are called to bring the face of Christ
to them by accompanying them.
We cannot take their pain away.
We cannot take their suffering away,
but we can do what God does for us,
which is accompany them,
be there with them in the midst of their pain and the suffering.
We do not have to have an answer but we have a response.
What we bring is hope to hope in the cross.
The final answer is the resurrection,
and that is for all of us to today.
We celebrate the hope in the cross
that God is with us and God will never abandon us.
And in the end we will be raised from the dead
and we will with God forever.
That there are many ways that this comes alive,
but the most important way is
to accompany people in their suffering.
That is the great gift that we get as priests,
is to be with them in their suffering and to anoint them.
Now, you do not have the oil,
I get that you do not have the oil of the anointing,
but what you do have is the oil of your presence,
the oil of your love,
the oil of who you are.
That is what you must use when they are suffering.
So they will know by the oil of your presence of your love,
that the Lord is here with them now
and that they will always be with them.
Today, we celebrate the hope in the cross
because it is not the last word.
The resurrection is the last word.
But we can bring the oil of our presence to others.
Behold, behold the wood of the cross…