We live in a world where life is equated with
noise. People gauge a productive life as
one that’s filled with noise and much activity.
They look at solitude and quiet as lack of production, as a waste of
time. However, for those who get to experience
quiet, we can appreciate that quiet gives God room to be God.
So often we are expecting God to work in dramatic and
powerful ways. We expect God to act and
interject himself in demonstrative ways..
And indeed we can say he works in the dramatic. Just think of the famous story of God
appearing to Moses in that burning bush.
It was a great Theophany, a manifestation of God’s presence, or perhaps God
parting the waters of the Red Sea.
Yet, however, we are fooled into thinking that when
God doesn’t come in those ways, that he
is absent. We think quiet means
absence. We think silence is
inactivity. We even think lack of noise
is defeat.
In these days, as we do each year during Holy Week,
especially in the sacred three days of the Triduum, we get to experience much
activity, the greatest activity of love.
Jesus suffers the great agony in the garden; he is betrayed; he is
arrested; he is put on trial; he is sentenced to be executed, even in his
innocence. He suffers a tremendously violent
and, if you will, loud amount of suffering.
He is made to carry the cross that he will die on. And when he dies, there
is silence. It will appear that he has
been defeated, that taking on our sins was just a waste of time. Following those hours on the cross, when he
breathes his last, there is silence. That silence can seem defeating.
In the hours following Jesus’s dying on the cross,
there was silence. Those who had
followed him, even his own mother, were left wondering, was the silence going
to mean that Jesus would be absent from them forever.? Did sin and death have the final word? Perhaps when we endure suffering and loss, we
ask why was God silent? Was God
absent? And yet our faith reminds us
that sin and death do not have the final word.
During the time from Good Friday afternoon, through Holy Saturday, until
the night when he would rise from the dead, God was indeed working. And in that morning, that first Easter
morning, Mary of Magdala would be experiencing that silence, that darkness. It was early in the morning. We all have experienced that quiet, just
prior to dawn. All creation seem still. Mary
sees the stone rolled away. She sees the
empty tomb. Maybe she didn’t fully grasp what had happened. God, in the silence, had accomplished the
greatest accomplishment. So she runs and
breaks the silence, telling them that Jesus is no longer in the tomb. And
because of that, we can be assured today, that what we experience in suffering
or witness in the suffering of others is never going to have the final word.
Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. He is never absent to us. In fact he is present to us so often in the
silence in which we feel he is missing. And
so let’s be open to God working in silence, in the quiet. In that silence and quiet, we discover the
faithfulness of God. Let us run and
break the silence and tell others the Good News!
That saving sacrifice of Jesus open for all of us the
gates to eternal life. As we go forward,
let us remember that in all times, in all things, even in the silence, God is
never absent. He is alive and working to
transform all of us to eternal life. May
he be praised both now and forever. Amen.
- The Servant
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