Why is there still so much suffering in the world?
You only have to read a newspaper or see the news on TV to realise that we do not live in a perfect world. Today despite all the advancements we have made over the last 2000 years there still seems to be a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Wars are still being fought, Christians are still being persecuted, Children are still starving and every so often for good measure that is a major natural disaster like a flood or earthquake thrown in.
There are plenty of people knocking on our doors telling us that we are living in the final days and that the end of the world is nigh. But that has been the case for at least 3000 years. We don’t live in a perfect world now and the Israelites had their fair share of problems long before Jesus was born.
Our first reading from the Book of Job attempts to come to terms with the problem of human suffering. You may wonder why Job should be put through the pain that he has to suffer and there is unfortunately no easy answer.
In the gospel passage Jesus cures Simon’s mother-in-law and throughout the gospels we see Jesus tending the sick and dying. Suffering may or may not be part of God’s master plan but the simple reality is that an awful lot of what is wrong with the world today is mankind’s fault, it has nothing to do with God.
Job 7:1-4, 6-7
Job here tries to make excuses for what he could not justify - his desire of death. He has had enough. He wants to throw in the sponge. He’s trying to grab hold of some reason for going on living:- the slave waiting for a chance to get out of the hot sun and into the shade; the workman who can think of nothing but ‘when will it be pay-day?’ And Job can’t come up with a good reason for going on living. He tosses and turns on his bed at night; and daytime never seems to come. When it does eventually come, he can’t wait for nightfall. When we read the opening chapters of the Book of Job, we can perhaps understand his anguish and frustration. A thoroughly good man, Job had worked hard; and he had been blessed. Then, in quick succession, all his possessions, his home and even his family were taken away from him. His friends who came to see him in order to comfort him, didn’t really help. He must have done something terribly wrong, they said, otherwise he wouldn’t have been punished like that. We’re all familiar with the expression “Job’s comforters,” well-meaning people who, while trying to make things better, just make things worse! When we are having a rough time, perhaps we can take comfort from Job if not from his comforters. In spite of his pain and anguish, Job persevered to the end; and even though the question of why innocent people have to suffer was never really answered, he was rewarded for his faithfulness and for not giving in.
1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23
Clergy, and Catholic priests in particular, sometimes have a reputation for always asking for money. This reputation is not always justified! A young priest in the Home Counties was visiting some houses in his parish one evening many years ago. He had been in one house for a short while when the lady of the house gave him a ten shilling note. “That’s kind of you,” the priest said, “but I was going anyway.” The lady must have thought that all the priest wanted was money although perhaps not for himself, and that the only way to get rid of him was to give him some money. Some of the people to whom Saint Paul was writing seemed to have thought the same way. What did he want? So he had to make it very clear that his sole concern was to proclaim the Good News. That was the force driving him on, and he was prepared to do anything, at any cost, to lead people to Christ. Everything else was of secondary importance.
Mark1:29-39
Saint Mark’s Gospel is full of movement, not surprisingly so when we consider that he crams an awful lot of material into relatively few words – his is the shortest of the four Gospels. Mark’s is a whistle-stop gospel. Having cast out the evil spirit from a man in the synagogue at Capernaum (the subject of last Sunday’s Gospel), Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law who then makes (we presume) a meal for Jesus and his companions. There is only a short respite before Jesus resumes his ministry of healing and casting out evil spirits. But his life and hence the life of his followers cannot be simply one of activity however praiseworthy or useful that activity might be. It must be rooted in prayer. So it is that, next morning, “long before dawn”, Jesus got up and went away to spend time alone in prayer to his heavenly Father. It was only then that he could take upon again his activity. In the feverishness of our lives, how much time do we devote to prayer each day?