30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, B October 27, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
“The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.” Does that sound convincing? If we cannot convince ourselves, how can we convince those who do not know God?
Preaching on this topic is always a little fraught with danger. For one thing, it rarely helps to try to guilt-trip people into being joyful. “Shame on your for not feeling joy! Start being joyful right now!” I say rarely, not never, because sometimes it does help to be called out on our sourness, to be challenged to choose gratitude and joy in the midst of our difficulties. So, do that. If you didn’t even say/sing the response, then at least do that much! Make the effort to focus less on what makes you sad and focus more on what is good, what God has done, what you have to be grateful for. We don’t have perfect control over our emotions and feelings, but we do have some influence on them. Use that influence.
At the same time, however, joy is not just a switch we can flip for ourselves. It is, ultimately, a fruit of the Holy Spirit. It comes from allowing God to work in our lives over time. Eventually, the seeds of faith, hope, and love start to mature and bear fruit in things like joy and peace. So, when we do not see the joy of God in our lives, it can be a wake-up call. Just as I cannot simply choose to have a steak instantly appear on my plate, I cannot simply choose to have joy in my heart. What I can do, however, is prep the grill and go shopping. A lack of joy is not a sin, but it could be a symptom of sin. All sin is a choice; feelings, desires, and experiences cannot be a sin but they can be connected to sin.
So, I don’t want people in confession to say “I don’t have joy.” What I want is for people to say to themselves, “I don’t have joy… why is that? Oh, it’s because I spent 2 hours indulging my jealousy over my neighbor’s new car” and then come in and confess the choice to indulge their jealousy or whatever other sin it was. If you said or sang that responsorial psalm about joy but didn’t really mean it, recognize it as a symptom! Then start looking for the cause, the actual disease in the tree of your soul which is stopping it from bearing the fruit of joy.
“Father, how do I do that?” I’m glad you asked, because that’s the first step. You have to want it. You may have noticed a common theme in my preaching: the theme of desire. You have to want to go to heaven. You have to want to be holy. You have to want to avoid sin. And that desire can’t just be an instinctive, passive, emotional type of thing – like the hunger you feel when you see a cookie. It has to be the kind of longing that you instigate and act on. Kind of like the blind man. Of course he wants to see! But he doesn’t just feel that desire, he chooses it. He acts on it. “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!” Even when there were obstacles, he didn’t give up on that desire but kept seeking it.
And he was heard! Jesus calls him up and asks him a question that is kind of dumb. “What do you want me to do for you?” Really, Jesus? The blind beggar desperately shouting your name, the guy who has no money and doesn’t even have his own name because his blindness so excludes him from society – “Bartimaeus” is literally just “Son of Timaeus” – what do you think he wants? But Jesus, of course, knows what he’s doing. Jesus too wants us to recognize our desires, to clearly understand them, to honestly and perseveringly bring them to him. He asks not to learn something for himself, but to teach us something.
And Bartimaeus answers “I want to see!” In so doing, he also learns something. When he gains his sight, Jesus tells him “go your way,” but what does he do? He follows Jesus on the way. By bringing his honest desires to Jesus, he not only receives what he thinks he wants, he learns that what he really wants is Jesus himself. He realizes that his first desire – to have physical sight – only exists for something else. That desire is not the goal, not the end. It is the means to an even greater end. And this gives him joy!
This is crucial for us to understand. Joy comes not from getting what we think we want, but from receiving and recognizing that we’ve received what is truly good for us. This is the second step. First is to want the joy. Second is to set our expectations in the right place, to be willing to learn what joy actually means rather than clinging to what we think it means. Being filled with joy does not mean always bubbling over with tangible excitement or pleasure or contentment. Joy, as the fruit of the Holy Spirit, means recognizing deep down that God has indeed done great things for you, that he’s given you what is truly good.
The third step is to actually get that, though. Unlike Bartimaeus here, we don’t always run straight to Jesus when he calls us. Maybe you don’t have joy because God hasn’t done great things for you. Maybe that’s because you’re so set on having Jesus come to you and do for you what you think he should do that you don’t let him do the great thing he has in store. In other words, maybe you and I prefer our own glory, pleasure, or power to what God offers – so we choose to sin, to keep sinning, to pretend we’re not sinning, or to only repent of our sin half-heartedly. We’re so good at justifying ourselves that that we convince ourselves it’s God’s fault for not doing great things.
But the Cross cuts through it all. The greatest thing God ever did for the greatest human who ever lived was raise him from the dead. But he let him be crucified first. Hebrews tells us “For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross.” The Cross – suffering – and Joy can coexist. Indeed, your suffering can lead to joy if you learn to see it in the light of Christ. That’s what Bartimaeus saw when he gained his sight. Not daylight and people, but that his blindness was transformed into a great thing God has done. Do you think he would have ever met Jesus had he always had his sight? That he would have been willing to leave everything behind… to radically conform his way to the way of Jesus Christ, had he not endured his blindness?
Much of our suffering is our fault, the result of our own sins and stubbornness in not following Jesus. We turn from that suffering to joy by never giving up the fight against sin and by following Jesus as best we can. Much of our suffering is not our fault, though, and the only remedy there is the cross. This is the fourth and final step in acquiring joy, to place our sufferings in his, to unite them to the cross, to view them with a trust in God’s providence that even this can be turned to glory if I let him do His great things in my life.
This is how Maximillian Kolbe could sing hymns of joy while being starved to death, how Padre Pio could rejoice in his pain, how Mother Teresa could describe suffering as kisses from Christ. Because they could see in them what great things the Lord has done.
The Lord has indeed done great things for me and for you. We have only to want them, to let go of things that get in their way, and to learn to see them for what they are. Then, like the saints before us, we too shall be filled with joy.
Step 1: Desire and ask for Joy from Jesus, keep asking
Step 2: Be open to receiving what Jesus gives, even when it’s not what you ask for
Step 3: Turn from sin and follow Jesus more closely
Step 4: Unite yourself and your sufferings to the Cross