Sixth Week of Ordinary Time
Disappointment. It’s an experience as common as death and taxes. Who has not felt disappointed in someone or something? Who has not felt disappointed in our own selves at times? Is it possible to get through a week – or even a day – without feeling some form of disappointment? Where do all these disappointments come from?
At every stage of our lives – friendship, school, work, marriage, family, or parish, to name but a few – we bring certain hopes and expectations to the table. We have expectations as to what our role and contributions will be, and hopes and expectations as to what others who are involved will be and do. The more important something is to us, the more important it will be that our hopes and expectations are met. When they are not met, the more bitter our disappointment will feel.
One area where disappointment can feel especially bitter is on our relationship with the Church. As Simon Tugwell writes in Ways Of Imperfection: “There is a kind of unsatisfactoriness built into the Church’s very constitution, because she is only a transitional organization, keeping people and preparing them for a new creation, in which God will be all in all, and every tear will be wiped away… Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations. It is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God… It is God who knows how to make us happy, better than we know ourselves. Christianity necessarily involves a remaking of our hopes. And our disappointments are an unavoidable part of the process.”
A deepening sense of disappointment runs through the early chapters of Genesis, from which the first readings for our Masses this week have been taken. There is the sin of Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel by Cain, and the gradual increase of sin that follows upon this. God is portrayed as “regretting” that he made humans and the world. However, it’s also possible to detect in these pages a disappointment with God, a disappointment that the reader brings. How will God deal with evil in the world? Why doesn’t God just wipe it out, if God is God? What would you expect of God? What would you do if you were God?
Of course, there is the story of Noah and the Flood. But it’s important to remember the result. God is not satisfied with the solution of simply “nuking” everything. God’s covenant with Noah is a way to state that God will not solve the problem of sin in that way. It doesn’t, after all. The story of the Tower of Babel shatters that illusion. No, God will begin again with an old, childless couple, Abram and Sarah, and will start to renew the earth through their gradual faithfulness to him. This is not the first solution we’d expect of God. Disappointed? There’s more.
In the Gospel readings for this week, the theme of disappointment emerges in several ways. Opposition is building against Jesus from the Pharisees and other religious leaders of the time. Jesus is not what they expect. In Tuesday’s Gospel reading, Jesus expresses disappointment in his disciples, who still don’t see what Jesus is about. In today’s Gospel reading, even though Peter seems to get Jesus’ question right, he promptly shows that his expectations based on his answer were not in harmony with who Jesus was. He objects to Jesus, showing some disappointment in him. He – and the others – need to have their expectations adjusted – rather, to have them enlarged, so that they could be more open to what Jesus was trying to teach them.
How do we face these disappointments? How does God work with us, recreating us, opening our expectations and helping them grow and shift to God’s own point of view?
We get a hint of this in yesterday’s Gospel reading. It’s an unusual healing story – the only one where Jesus heals someone in stages. Jesus meets a blind man and touches the man’s eyes. The man can see, but not that well. People look like walking trees. So Jesus touches the man again, and the man’s sight is fully restored.
It is no accident that mark places this healing account just before the story in today’s Gospel. Jesus asks his disciples who they say he is. Peter responds, “You are the Christ!” He (and the others) see that much. But they don’t see everything clearly yet. Peter shows this when he objects to Jesus’ statement that he must first suffer, die and rise again. Peter’s expectations will need more healing. He still has some blindness, as do the other disciples. Even after the Resurrection, they ask Jesus if he was going to restore the kingdom to Israel right away. No, the Romans were still there. It wasn’t happening quite the way they expected. But they soon came to see how the Lord works, and came to have faith in the gift of his Spirit within them. The Spirit would gradually heal their blindness and remake their hopes and expectations. They would learn to place their faith in God, and God’s will for them.
So it is with us. Disappointments are inevitable. Sometimes, they come from people who are obviously falling very short of what the Gospel calls us to be. Sometimes, they come from people we love, even when they try their best to do the right thing. But, at other times, we gradually learn that the problem was our own expectations. We were insisting that people and things get in line with the way we ourselves thought they should be. We might not have recognized that God has a wider view and that these people and events may have been a means for us to encounter the limits of our personal expectations and to once again affirm our trust in God’s infinite mercy and love for every one of us.
Disappointment may feel like a closed door or a slap in the face. Nevertheless, it could be merely a sign that we’ve taken a wrong road. Let the Holy Spirit be our map and get us back on track. Let us trust the goodness of God, who has so much to give us – if only our expectations don’t get in the way. Disappointment may be God’s way of tilling the soil of our hearts so that we can better receive his word and bear more fruit for the world.