psalm 146 - amen, it is reliable - 26th sunday C

What’s one word that survived thousands of years and has been adapted to hundreds of languages and dialects without any modification to its meaning?  Sometimes it may be pronounced a little differently but it is discernible all over many languages.  So what is the word? If you said “Amen,” then you guessed it right.  Amen.

But what does Amen really mean?

The word amen is related to a word in the first line of our responsorial psalm today, psalm 146, “blessed is he who keeps faith, or blessed is he who keeps truth forever.”  To keep faith, to keep truth means God is blessed because God is trustworthy, he is credible, he is reliable – we are affirming what we believe.  And so when the priest says “the body of Christ” and you respond “Amen,” it means, “it is, it is indeed the body of Christ.”  Or when the priest prays and ends it saying “we ask this through Christ our Lord,” and we respond saying “amen,” it means “God is trustworthy, God is faithful, God is truthfulness, when He says it He does it, He fulfills His promises and He will deliver.”  That short word A-M-E-N is loaded.

But there is another implication when we say this very rich word.  When I say Amen to God it also means that I agree with God, my thoughts coincide with his thoughts, my point of view coincides with his point of view, my choices coincide with his choices.  My amen means that I share in God’s choices, it means that I must become like God when he secures justice for the oppressed, I must be like God when he gives food to the hungry, when he sets captives free, when he gives sight to the blind and raise up those who were bowed down; When I say Amen I too should love the just as God does, and protect strangers the same way he does.  My amen is not just an affirmation of God’s faithfulness, it is also my desire to do as God does.

What is wrong with the rich man in our gospel today?  Is it his wealth, did he do something wrong to Lazarus – did he insult him, did he kick him out, did he refuse him food.  No.  In fact Lazarus was free to pick up the fragments that fell from his table.  But what is disturbing is the fact that the rich man did not find the sight of Lazarus disturbing as he sat there at his door with sores all over his body while he, the rich man, feasted daily and lavishly.  He could not relate to the misery of Lazarus, he could not feel the hunger of Lazarus, he could not sense the need of Lazarus.  In short, here was somebody who did not take his Amen seriously.  He does not feel like God, he does not see like God, he does not reach out like God.

This year is the year of mercy.  The year is an invitation for us to become merciful like the Father, to be compassionate like Jesus.  How can we become compassionate like Jesus, how can we feel the way God feels for others?

Our alleluia verse this Sunday says, “though our Lord Jesus Christ was rich, he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”  Many times it is our own experience of poverty that makes us compassionate and merciful like God – Jesus is rich, he is God and yet he chose poverty, he chose to be human in order that he can be compassionate with us, so that he can understand what a human need is, how it is to go hungry, how it is to suffer because of the persons we love.

So it is with us.  Our ability to sympathize comes from experiencing for ourselves personally the same situation of need and the same difficulty.  The way to become merciful therefore is to look into one’s own experience of suffering and pain.

When I was assigned in a parish, a big fire hit a squatter's area. People there are very poor.  Immediately as the news broke a person came to me with a donation saying, Father I know how it feels when all that you have is burnt by fire – please help them father and start with this donation.

Try fasting, do not eat the whole day then around 4 o'clock in the afternoon go to a restaurant, stand in the middle of the restaurant. Take a deep breath, do not eat anything - just take a long, deep breath. Notice what’s happening to you, to your stomach, to your saliva.  Now you have just felt how it is to be very hungry in the midst of plenty.  And yet people experience that everyday.  Then you will understand what the little boy feels when he looks at you as you eat heartily your hamburger.  Then you will feel anger when people just throw away food, food that can alleviate the pain of an empty stomach.

In the seminary I am the rector, and sometimes I really feel bad when I have to expel or let go a seminarian who did not pass his exams, a seminarian who did something wrong, a seminarian who failed.  Because once upon a time there was also a would be seminarian who had big dreams for himself.  He also wanted to enter the seminary but alas he failed.  He did not pass.  Then after so much pleading the former rector smiled at him and said, ok we will give you another chance.  And in that class I was the only one who became a priest because somebody believed in me and gave me another chance.

To be human is to know suffering in all of its manifestations.  And only when we look into the wealth these experiences of sufferings can we learn to become merciful to each other.  Only then can we feel like God, and see like God.  And only then can our Amen be sincere.