The Holy Spirit, in the voice of Saint Paul, asks us a blunt question: “What will separate us from the love of Christ?” (Romans 8:35). What follows might as well read, “Will pandemic, or unemployment, or spending your savings, or virtual schooling, or facemasks, or elections, or protests, or global warming, or zombie fires, or murder hornets? To this, Saint Paul says, “No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). There is no social distancing form the love of God!
We are all accustomed to complaining on some level about how weird the 2020s have been. But the Holy Spirit foreordained this second reading to come up right now, to remind us all that Jesus Christ is bigger than all the oddities. We don’t just conquer these things. We conquer overwhelmingly. Not on our own efforts, but rather through him who loved us. Jesus loves us, and all the challenges and uncertainty we are faced with cannot separate us from his love that conquers overwhelmingly.
It sounds like pious platitudes but take it from Saint Paul. He knows a thing or two about challenges and uncertainty. Here are his own words:
“Five times at the hands of the Jews I received forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I passed a night and a day on the deep; on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through frequent fastings, through cold and exposure. And apart from these things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak?” (2 Corinthians 11:24-29)
And yet he dares to say that in all these we conquer overwhelmingly through Jesus Christ. Elsewhere, Saint Paul writes to the Philippians that he considers the loss of all things to be so much rubbish compared to knowing Jesus (see Philippians 3:8). In his original Greek, “rubbish” is skubala, a word not infrequently used of the solid waste that comes from the large intestine. In 1611, King James of England had this word translated as “dung,” and I’m sure you can think of a few other words for it. What we’ve experienced in the last six months were normal occurrence for Saint Paul and he considered it just a bunch of skubala because he knew Jesus.
How are we going to get through these strange times? Today the Holy Spirit reminds us that simply getting by is not the real goal. The real goal is to conquer overwhelmingly the skubala in your life, but only by knowing and following Jesus Christ. Nothing can separate us from his love. Thank God for that!