Readings: Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4: 12-23

Christ sent me to preach the Gospel so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning.

We need only to look at the news to get a sense of the enormity of suffering in our world. If we look at the floods, mining disasters, landslides, volcanic eruptions, droughts, bombings and supermarket and school slayings, the world seems to be a Kingdom of Carnage. The suffering of others touches us. Yet, what has this to do with our Christian spirituality? Do we have to walk through a bloodbath to come to the saving blood of Christ? Is God pleased with suffering? And while we`re asking, is God more pleased by our anguish than by our joy? Does God accept us more readily in our wounds than in our wholeness?

We have met people who wonder how long God will let them – or more usually, will let others – get away with enjoying themselves. The spiritual outlook of some people seems to be that, sooner or later, God makes people pay for their love of life. Success sometimes makes people anxious because they believe that pain and failure is our natural lot and that success may even cause the arrival of failure.

Last Thursday evening, about 5.00pm, I was just about to leave Wooroloo Prison after a full day there. On my way out I stopped to converse with an inmate and he spoke freely about his eventful life – for about an hour. I listened with increasing admiration for this man and when I mentioned that, with his experience and insights he would make a good prison chaplain, he said that he was not good enough for such a job. I responded by asking: Who is worthy? Who is `good enough`? Haven`t we heard people say at times that God takes their wife or husband or child from them because they were too beautiful or because they were too good.

When people suffer, they sometimes think that God Is punishing them.

This spiritual outlook is as old as history itself: the ancient neighbours of the Hebrew people like the Babylonians believed that the world was made out of the side of a dying god wounded in battle with another god and that all human beings were the slaves of the gods.

That this spiritual outlook still operates today is an assault on perhaps the holiest thing that God made – namely, human life. It demeans the splendour of the universe. It is a spirituality grim, barbarous and ugly beyond description. So let me say that suffering in all its forms is an evil. No Christian should choose it as a value in its own right.

Yet every human life will have its measure of pain. The question for a Christian spirituality is: What shall we make of suffering? To focus on suffering is a mistake – the more we centre on pain, the more its intensity seems to increase. The more we resent suffering the more we forfeit the opportunity to develop and grow in the spiritual life. The more aggrieved we are about pain, the more we may inflict it on others who love us the most.

There is a spiritual phrase that seems to me to be a profound insight into not only the nature and character of our lives, but also the quality of our lives. It is this: the sacrament of the present moment. The sacrament of the present moment leads us to be aware of the meaningfulness of life and of the presence of God in each moment. The sacrament of the present moment says to us: `Please don`t look to the past and wish for what is gone` and `Please don`t look to the future and desire that which may never exist`; rather `Live in the present moment, whether it is fabulous or frightening and find in that moment something you need to experience`.

Every moment of your life is sacramental because it reveals God to you and brings God`s grace with it. Each moment comes to us and enters our life story: wonderful moments and suffering moments. Both kinds of moments teach us about the texture of our lives and the character of the cosmos we inhabit.

Suffering is not merely something we wait for passively to come along and wallop us. We know that suffering is generated by the very act of living – the choices we make and the goals we set for ourselves. Indeed, if the choices are successful and the goals are achieved, they seem to compensate abundantly for the sacrifice entails in our choices and goal-seeking.

Jesus, suffering terribly on the cross, does not choose the pain. The crucifixion of Jesus was a consequence of his choices and the goals he set for himself. The manner of his death was a consequence of the life he had chosen to live. Jesus does not choose the suffering, he chooses the life. Jesus does not choose the cross, he chooses the love which makes the cross inevitable.

Writer Tim Winton (described in The Los Angeles Times as `a one-man band of genius`) wrote in his 2004 book of short stories The Turning a story entitled The Aquifer. In this story, Winton was led to think of the Perth street of his childhood – the families, the housing blocks, the `battlers of the early sixties` – the Poms (his word), those from Holland and from the Balkans, the Aboriginal family in the street. And the Joneses (`the kind of Joneses who didn`t need much keeping up with`). It was all new.

At the end of the story and its events, Winton says, referring to his memories of those times and those events – `Perhaps time moves through us AND NOT US THROUGH IT. Seeing the Joneses out on the street just confirmed what I`ve thought . . . that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.`

So instead of us `moving on` from things, maybe things `move in`.

Let me finish with a quotation from one of my favourite theologians, Karl Rahner: If we want to share in the life and sufferings of Jesus, we do so most effectively by bearing the burdens of our life – with its choices and goals – with simple courage and without great show, without ostentation. Because we share, by faith, in the passion of Jesus, by realising that our life is a participation in his destiny. Often we fail to understand that the bitterness and burdens of our own lives give us a share in the destiny of all human beings. If we are aware of this, we come to understand that Christ`s sufferings were/are the unique acceptance (embrace) of the passion of human kind, in which it is accepted, redeemed and liberated into the infinitely knowable Mystery of God.