One thing that everyone has in common is the search for happiness. Everyone
wants and hopes to find happiness. We may have very different
ideas as to what happiness is, but we are all looking for it.
The biggest problem seems to be where to find it. We will look
for it in a partner, through children, through work. When we
fall in love we may think we have found it. But if we persevere
in a relationship we will realize that while it is great to have this
other person with us, they won’t fulfill me completely either,
because they cannot. I am asking the impossible of someone if I
expect them to completely fulfill me, because only God can do that.
Hopefully our happiness will begin in this life and we will have many
happy times, but total fulfillment is in the next life. I think
that even to accept that much is a big step in the right direction.
When Jesus began his
public ministry one of the first things he said was, ‘Repent and
believe the good news’, or in today’s Gospel it says ‘Repent
for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’ We usually
understand the word ‘repent’ to mean, ‘ask forgiveness for sin
and do some kind of penance.’ That is certainly part of what
it means, but there is also more to it than that. It can also
be understood to mean, ‘change the direction in which you are
seeking happiness.’ ‘Turn around and look in the right
place.’ Jesus is telling us that we certainly aren’t going
to find happiness if we look in the wrong place, which sounds obvious
enough. And then he also says, ‘and believe the good news.’
What is the good news? It is the message that God is interested
in us and that God has created us to be happy, but we will only find
that happiness in God.
You know the way it says
in many of the Gospel passages, ‘Jesus was speaking to the people
when a man came up who was sick…’ or ‘Jesus was preaching the
word to them, when…’ What was Jesus saying to the people
all those times that He preached to them? No doubt He was
teaching them about God and about how God relates to us and
explaining why God invites us to follow a certain path and what that
path involves. That path is the one that leads to God, which is where
we will find happiness.
Now part of that path is
the need to turn from sin and to ask for forgiveness, because sin is
what will come between us and God and can prevent us from finding
that happiness. That is why Jesus was so strong about the need
to turn away from what is wrong. ‘If your hand should cause
you to sin, cut it off... or if your eye should cause you to sin,
tear it out! It is better to enter heaven without one hand than
to lose that happiness.’ This is an exaggerated way of
speaking, in order to make a point, just like we say, ‘I’ll kill
you if you do that again!’ Jesus is saying, ‘Don’t let
anything cause you to lose the happiness that God has for you,’
because nothing is worth it.
We are up against the
difficulty of the world around us telling us that we will not be
happy if we don’t live a certain way, or if we don’t have a
certain lifestyle, or certain material things. And we are
bombarded with these ideas day and night. But who are we going
to listen to: the Son of God, or our society? God is
telling us to make sure we look for happiness in the right place, so
that we won’t be disappointed.
They say that 96-98% of
the population suffers from addiction to something. What is
addiction but the search for happiness gone badly wrong, where we
become obsessed with something thinking that we will die without it,
or be totally unhappy without it, be it alcohol, drugs, work, or
whatever. The interesting thing is that the only program that
is known to really be effective in helping people to overcome
addictions is the twelve step program. That program is the
Christian life in twelve steps. Even just the first few steps:
- We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol (or sin)—that our lives had become unmanageable.
- We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (God) could restore us to sanity.
- We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
- We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. (Repentance)
The truth is that all of
us are addicted to sin. We are all drawn to what we know is not
good for us and will probably lead us further from God. And
what God is telling us is that this is not a problem if we
continually turn to him. He is the way out and the way forward
and most importantly, it is only in him we will find full happiness.
As Jesus began his public
ministry he also began calling people to follow him and become his
instruments to pass on this message after he had gone back to
heaven. First he called the Apostles. They in their turn
ordained more Apostles who also enlisted priests and many lay men and
women. Why was it so important that this message be passed on?
Because this was and is the message that tells us what our life is
about, why we are here, where we are going, and that we have been
created for happiness. The most complete happiness awaits us if
we keep turning back to God. As we grow closer to God in this
life, things also begin to make more sense. That is why the
Apostles were willing to give up everything, even their own lives, in
order to pass on this message, just as countless men and women have
done throughout the centuries. They understood that this was
it, this was what everyone needed to hear and so they dedicated the
rest of their lives to preaching this message of Christ so that all
of us could hear it.
Today we continue to try
and pass on that same message, so that all people may know what God
has created us for and so that we have a sense of what our life is
about.
‘Repent
and believe in the good news.’
Change the direction in which you are seeking happiness.
No comments:
Post a Comment