The Way God Thinks

The Gospel contrasts God's way of thinking with (wo)man's way of thinking. What is the difference between the two? At issue in this Sunday's Gospel passage is the value of suffering. While for humans, suffering is a dead-end, in which there is no way out, for God, suffering is an opening that leads to something greater, something bigger. But since that "something" is not readily experienced, it is difficult to believe in it. Here is where "faith that does good works" is necessary, as the second reading emphasizes.

My 3 months experience in prison ministry (National Bilibid Prisons, Muntinlupa City) has taught me to believe in this promise. The prison is a place of suffering: physical, psychological, spiritual, for the inmates, and for us who minister to them, who journey with them. But our daily celebration of the Eucharist, most often with utmost fervor and devotion, and the real felt need for God's mercy and hope, awakens in us the conviction that beyond, and even in the midst of the suffering they are going through, an opening towards a new life is showing forth. And this new life can begin not only after they have served their sentence, but and even during the time they are in prison.

Hence, our church volunteers: sacristans, readers, eucharistic lay ministers, and others, are all inmates. Many of them have seen that "opening' and have entered through it. Some are still stumbling along the way in search of the way to it. You and I may think they won't find the way. But God thinks otherwise, and that makes the big difference.