If God is God, Why do Bad Things Happen?

Against the backdrop of hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires and mass shootings,  I mentioned in my homily last week that some folks are asking,“Where is God in all of this? Why doesn’t God do something about all this bad news?”

Since then, I’ve been reminded that some believe that God is right in the middle of these disasters and calamities, that God visits disasters upon usas punishment for the mess we’ve made of the world, for our being unfaithful to his word and commandments.

That’s a tempting proposition – to blame God for these tragedies, both the natural and the man-made.

Even the gospel today might lead us to wonder if God, like the king who gave the wedding feast, if God picks and chooses who gets into the banquet and who is banished to the darkness outside; if God charts the paths of hurricanes  and the fault lines of earthquakes we view from the safety of our living rooms; if God chooses to spare hundreds – but not all – from a sniper’s deadly aim; if God, with a great huffing and puffing, blows the winds that feed the fires that ravage forests and neighborhoods?

Worthiness for the Wedding Banquet

A woman decided that she was going to have a dinner party for a good number of her friends.  So, she spent most of the week cleaning, baking, cooking, and preparing the table.  And when everyone finally arrived and sat down to eat, she turned to her six year old daughter and said, “Honey, why don’t you say the blessing?”  “Mommy,” she said, “I don’t know what to say.”  “Just simply say what you hear Mommy say.”  So the little girl bowed her head and said, “Dear Lord, why on earth did I invite all of these people to dinner?”

Like the woman in the story, you and I can occasionally have regrets about the invitations that we offer.  But that is not the case with our God.  For our God is a God of invitation.  A God who is constantly inviting all people into relationship, inviting all to share in divine life and love.

Invitation as a Threat

The difficulty of understanding today’s parable of the wedding feast is the strange response of those who were invited. Some simply said, “No,” and went about their own business. But the parable tells us that the rest mistreated the messengers and killed them. So why would you kill someone who is inviting you to a wedding feast? The response seems absurd. In fact the only way I can make sense out of it is to imagine that those who responded in that way did not see the king’s offer as an invitation but somehow as an attack. They did not perceive the request to come as a gift but something that would do them harm.

How can we explain such a mistaken conclusion? To answer that question we need go no further than our own experience. As you and I make decisions and choices in our lives, denial, hurt, and pre-judgments can skew our perception so that what is a positive opportunity can appear as a threat.

I Can Do All Things in Him who Strengthens Me

An angry mob gathered around Paul of Tarsus, this little but loud missionary of Jesus Christ. They didn’t want to hear what he had to say. It was time to shut him up, permanently. So they threw stones at him. Then, when he fell down, they dropped heavy stones on him. They left him, unconscious and presumed to be dead. At other times, Paul was beaten with rods, and whipped. He was left cold and homeless in the elements. He was even shipwrecked, drifting at sea doing his best to keep from drowning. He survived all this. Eventually, though, Paul was tried for treason before the Romans in Jerusalem. All expected him to be sentenced to death, but Paul used his status as a Roman citizen to appeal to the emperor and have his trial moved to Rome. In Rome he preached and converted gentiles right in the heart of the empire. This continued until the Emperor Nero had him beheaded.

Let’s look at today’s Gospel in five stages.

1. RICH REPAST 
2. RUDE REJECTION
3. RESULTING RUIN
4. RELENTLESS RESOLVE
5. REMAINING REQUIREMENT

I’ve often joked that Catholics make easy targets for Protestant proselytising, because they just don’t seem to know how to give the right answers. Why aren’t Catholics able to give an answer? It’s not just a matter of shallowness of faith and ignorance of their catechism. Somethings are just beyond the radar of most Catholics. Salvation being one of them. When was the last time you heard a Catholic discuss salvation? Like ‘never’! It’s not because he doesn’t believe in it, but more precisely, because he believes that salvation is guaranteed for everyone, including himself. “All people would be saved!” “Anyone who dies would go to heaven” (we don’t even have to pass through Purgatory). And finally, “the Church no longer teaches nor believes in hell.”

Clergy E-Notes

“…if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being.”

— Pope Francis

When Things are Not as They Appear

It is very disconcerting to discover that things are not as they appear. The beautiful looking orange that is all dried up inside. The car that had been ranked highly by Consumer Reports that turned out to be a lemon. And this can go way beyond just being disappointed in our expectations.

The role model — coach, teacher or priest — who has many good qualities, but some secret fatal flaw that goes way beyond just having clay feet. Have you ever been let down badly by someone you really admired, maybe even scandalized to learn shocking things that you would never have suspected?

Something about a family member or someone else whom you thought you knew really well? Maybe one of your colleagues at work or one of your schoolmates whom everyone likes, but as it turns out, is into something really bad?

Secularism Destroys the Soul

Bottom line: What ultimately matters is how we respond to Jesus’ invitation: “Everything is ready. Come to the feast.”

The secular perspective was summed up a few years ago by a Seattle businessman and philanthropist. A reporter asked him what he thought about attending religious services. He responded, “I can think of more productive ways of spending a Sunday morning.” A secularist values productivity – really above everything else. So if a person loses their productively, they lose their value.* 

Bishop Robert Barron says, “secularism destroys the soul”. We have seen that in our society. As we have become more secularized, we have fallen into more depression and addictions. I see it especially among our young people. The Center for Disease Control reported that, according to their study, in the month of June 25% of young people, age 18-24, considered suicide. The study considered that the Covid-19 lockdown brought increased the isolation, stress and substance abuse. The Bible says that man is not meant to live alone. We need each other and we need God.

Answering God’s Invitation to the Banquet: Prayer

How can we describe our relationship with God? How can we describe the spiritual life that God offers us? We have to use human terms to describe what God offers us. Jesus also spoke about spiritual matters using human terms. His parables teach us using things from everyday life. That is why, in the Gospel today, Jesus described the kingdom of heaven as a wedding reception. The king sent servants to bring in the invited guests. The king in the parable is obviously God. God is inviting us to life with him. God offers us his life now, not just after death, but God is inviting us to share his life right now. How? Prayer is the way above all to share in the life of God now. Prayer is accepting the king’s invitation to the banquet.

The Marriage Feast

The marriage feast in today’s Gospel (Matthew 22:1-14) is that of Jesus, for he is the king’s son, the bridegroom who is in love with the human race and who invites everyone to the banquet prepared by his Father. Jesus refers to himself as a bridegroom quite early in Matthew’s Gospel (9:15) and returns to this same image in his parable of the bridesmaids, half of whom were well prepared, with oil in their lamps ready to burn at the appropriate time, but the other half did nothing, only to find that they were too late to attend the wedding (Matthew 25:1-13). The image of the wedding feast is a daring one, highlighting the intimacy of love into which Jesus calls us.

Dressed for the Banquet

So why are some people who are already in the promised banquet-land excluded for the feeble-sounding reason that they are improperly dressed?

What has helped me understand this odd state of affairs is CS Lewis’s wonderful fantasy, The Great Divorce, which he wrote to suggest that the option between heaven and hell is a radical choice we all have.

In this short, allegorical story, it turns out that a group of people, after a long bus ride, find themselves in a strange location. It is the vestibule of heaven itself, a place they have all generally wanted to go. The problem is that they must now believe that they are actually there. They must accept the fact that God really saves them.

Don’t Forget your Wedding Garment

My friends, the salvation offered to the whole world at the wedding banquet of the Son requires a response from us. It requires a response. Just as we are dressed in a white garment after we have been baptized, once we are invited into the wedding feast, our faith must now look like something. Our lives must be dressed in what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus. Our lives must visibly demonstrate reverence, charity, caring for the less fortunate, trueness to our word, trueness to our baptismal promises, honesty and uprightness, following the commandments, and following the precepts of the Church. You get the picture. Once we are invited into the banquet of the Son, once we are invited into the Eucharistic feast, our lives must look like we belong there. Follow?