A few years
ago a Dominican priest friend of mine told me the following story. He was based in Dublin,
and because of renovations to their church they were using a make-shift chapel at the time, which was a bit cramped.
The chapel was jammed as they were celebrating the Easter Vigil and
he said that the reader was reading the account of creation in
Genesis in a rather posh accent. While he was reading this piece of Scripture a wino
came up to the top of the chapel and sat down right underneath where
the man was reading and listened to the reading. When he got to
the part of the reading that says ‘God saw all that He had made
and indeed it was very good,’ the wino said out loud, ‘You’re
havin’ me on!’ Then the reader went on to the next part and
again when he got to the part ‘...and
indeed it was very good’, again the wino said out loud ‘You’re
having me on!’ While it might have seemed very ignorant of
the man to interrupt the reading like this, what he was saying was
that this might be what the scriptures say, but it
certainly wasn’t his experience of the world.
How do we
make sense of a reading like today’s Gospel which says that Jesus,
the anointed one of God, came to bring good news to the poor, to free
prisoners, etc? For many people, such as that wino, and indeed
many others too, their experience of the world is that it is a
difficult place where often things don’t work out. Think of
the families who are living in the middle of war at this time, or
even those who are really struggling to survive in our own country.
What could possibly be ‘good news’ for them?
The ‘good
news’ that the Son of God came to tell us is that there is a
purpose to our lives. We are here for a reason. Our lives
are not meaningless and the meaning of our lives does not depend on
how ‘successful’ or otherwise things seem to be for us in this
world. How well we do on the outside is not really that important.
What is primary is what happens inside us, in the heart. God
has created us to love and to serve and to blossom as people. Hopefully we
will also do well on the outside and be able to provide for our loved
ones and enjoy this life too, but whether or not everything works out
well for us is really secondary. The only thing that really
matters is that we realise what the purpose of our life is about—to
love God and the people around us. That is something that
everyone can do, no matter what their circumstances.
I used to
visit a man in prison for a couple of years while I was studying to
be a priest. He was in for a very serious crime and he was
doing a life sentence. As far as I know he is still in prison.
Having got to know him I also realised that he was basically a very
good man himself. The crime he committed, which was a murder,
was one of these bizarre things that happened, where 30 seconds
either way and he would never have met the person he killed.
Now his life is apparently ruined and he will spend most of it in
prison. Does this mean that his life is meaningless, or totally
wasted? Not necessarily so; it depends on what goes on inside
him more than anything else, because that is what God sees and that
is what God will judge him by. That is what God will judge all
of us by: how we have loved. Whether we end up living on the
street or being the president of some huge company is really not that
important. Of course we should try to make the most of the
opportunities that we are given and hopefully we will do well, but if we can see that the purpose
of our lives is much deeper than just what we achieve on the outside,
in the world’s eyes, then we will have an inner strength that will
help us keep going no matter what happens.
This ‘good
news’ that we often talk about, is that we are loved, we are
noticed, we are valued, and there is a purpose to our lives. We
are not just here by chance. God deliberately created us.
God wants us here at this particular time in history, in the
particular family that we are part of. If I cannot see this
bigger picture then my life may appear to be meaningless, pointless,
especially if things haven’t worked out the way I think they should
have. But that is to limit my purpose to my own very limited
way of seeing the world. If I try to see it with the eyes of
faith, then I will see something quite different. To understand
that is to give sight to the blind and freedom to those who are
imprisoned. It’s not just prisons like ‘Mountjoy’ in
Dublin either, but the kind of prison of the mind that tells me that
my life is a waste of time. No one’s life is a waste of time
if we realise that God wants us here. Our job here is primarily
to love and serve God and the people around us. The key for us is to see the bigger picture.
‘I came
that you may have life and have it to the full’ (John 10:10)
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