The scene is all too familiar: sirens blaring, flashing lights, mothers and fathers and grandparents weeping frantically as they hurry toward the school. There is chaos and confusion. And then, there is doubt and despair.
Where is God in this? How can God be good if there is this?
This evil is not of God.
Chaos is not of God. Our God is a God of order. Confusion is not of God. Our God is a God of peace.
As if he knew we’d need them, Jesus had words for us on the morning after the school shooting in Texas. In the context of the Mass that day, the words of the Gospel began, “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.’ ”
Jesus did know we’d need them. He knew every cross we would carry, every sorrow we would bear. And he knew not to tell us about them all at once, because it would be too much to know, too much to feel.
But he knew. God has been carrying the weight of it all since he climbed to the cross.
And he knew that as the chaos stirred us, faith would falter, and the father of lies would stir up desolation.
So, he promised the Spirit of truth to speak directly into those lies. He didn’t leave us; he left us with an advocate. He left us with the Holy Spirit, who would be waiting in those moments to console us. He made us promises that conquer death and bring us to life.
“He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”
He promises that glory will reign. Further, he promises that we are his and we will share in that glory. God knows what evil is. And he knows how wounded we are. About the Holy Spirit, John Paul II wrote, “No one else, only he the Spirit of Truth … can touch that profound discrepancy that is within the human being, that brokenness that is in him.”
God’s got this.
In the first reading from the day after the Texas shooting, St. Paul is preaching to the pagans at the Areopagus. He uses a clever rhetorical technique and quotes a pagan poet with whom they would have been familiar. He shows how this poet had a sense of truth, even when he didn’t know of whom he was writing. “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ ”
His offspring. His heirs. We are his. He is ready, waiting, and willing to console and to bring peace. St. Paul continues, “Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination. God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.”
How did the people respond?
“When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, ‘We should like to hear you on this some other time.’ And so Paul left them. But some did join him, and became believers.”
Here is how we live and move and have our being with him in this troubled time. We have a choice.
Like the people at the Aeropagus, we can scoff or mock or shrug our shoulders and walk away.
We could agree that the message is a good one, but that it does not call to us urgently today. We can leave it for some vague “other time.”
Or we can join St. Paul and become a believer, knowing that God demands that all people everywhere repent. Even you. Even me.
The message is urgent and necessary and very much for us today. We need the Holy Spirit. We need him to speak truth to the lies. We need him to touch the brokenness and heal it, and we need to be consoled.
The time is now.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
