Jesus wasn’t an instant success. He had to endure the triumph of failure. Paul Andrews SJ shows haw we can do the same.
Everyone, yes everyone, has sorrowful mysteries in their lives. They may be sad things that happen to us or to those close to us, like the sicknesses of ourselves or our loved ones, the betrayals, the failures. Or they may be interior things that we find hard to explain, such as a depression or a hidden conflict of the heart.
Our response
We show so much of ourselves by the way we respond to such trials. Some people cannot leave them alone. Part of them imagines they can undo the past. They get stuck in the feeling: It should not have happened. It should not be like this. Quite right: it should not have happened.
There is evil in this world. God’s work is never done under ideal conditions. Real success does not consist in getting it right all the time. Success is what we do with our failures. When we look at Jesus on the cross, we see the greatest, bitterest failure; yet the Church calls it a happy failure, Felix culpa. As it was a source of blessings, so can our own crosses be.
Taste of failure
We too easily see Jesus as an icon, someone who has arrived and succeeded. But he was human like us, and tasted failure. Some of his own relations thought him mad. The people of Nazareth, his home town, turned against him. He wept over Jerusalem, the holy city, because its people would not listen.
He chose Peter as the chief of his followers, only to see Peter deny him. He chose Judas as treasurer of the apostles, only to see Judas betray him with a kiss. He chose James and John for the inner core of the apostles, only to find them squabbling over who would be the biggest boss in the Kingdom that they expected. Again and again he felt the apostles had no notion of what he was saying: Do you still not understand what I am telling you? He loved the rich young man who had lived a good life, and came asking to be a follower of Jesus. But when Jesus invited him to give up his riches, and the man turned away, Jesus accepted that he was powerless to force him.
In the end he faced total rejection by his people. He was keenly aware of human limitations, of our pride, sensuality, self-centredness. He knew what it felt like to fail and be betrayed by friends.
Sorrowful mysteries
We say the Rosary round the events of Jesus’ life. It is easy to imagine Mary reflecting on those mysteries, lingering on her memories of the angel Gabriel, of her visit to Elizabeth, of the birth in Bethlehem, of Jesus as a child. I suspect she would have found it hard to turn to the sorrowful mysteries, to the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Some memories are so painful that we try to avoid them. But if we have areas of our past that we cannot revisit, they become a sore point in our minds. We need to see where God was in them.
Eyes of faith
Our Lord said: Take up your cross. It is not something you go looking for in faraway places. Sooner or later the Lord hands us a cross, and our job is to recognize it. For each of us there are events that made a difference. Our sorrowful mysteries will be different for each one of us. Maybe it was a meeting with a friend, a lover or an enemy. Maybe it was a sickness, or a triumph.
We are trying to see our life through the eyes of faith, with a confidence that God in his Providence can draw good out of the most awful and unwelcome happenings. It is not that we have all the answers, but we have enough to sustain our faith and love. Love is the fruit of faith, that is, of darkness. It is based on God’s faithfulness.
This is true wisdom, to find a faith that can carry us through darkness, doubt, and suffering. They call it the mystical phase of religious development, and many of you readers are there. In the Sacred Heart of Jesus we see the possibility of a love that survives darkness and suffering.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (August 2007), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
