Search for meaning

Today's readings: Job 7, 1-4.6-7; 1 Corinthians 9, 16-19.22-23; Mark 1, 29-39.

Today's Scriptures speak on the one hand of the human condition and on the other of the need to preach and embrace the good news of the Gospel. The Book of Job speaks of man's life on earth as nothing more than pressed service, "like a life of hard manual labour, like a slave longing for cool shade". It sounds so tragic, to say the least. Job himself does not understand. We identify with Job not in his knowledge but in his ignorance.

This same human condition is then represented in the Gospel of Mark in the crowds pressing around Jesus who "cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another". We know that in biblical language, the world of evil, disease and death is the world of Satan. It is all that makes our life miserable. And in the Gospel, wherever Jesus passes, the presence and dominion of evil is the more openly revealed and brought to light.

In this first chapter of Mark the image of Jesus curing the crowds and casting out many devils is very eloquent. It underlines the holistic mission of Jesus, that of total liberation of the human being. Miracle stories form about half of Mark's entire Gospel. These miracles are signs of Jesus's power to heal our brokenness.

What is the point and purpose of life? This is the pressing question of meaning and of hope that characterises so much our existence. It is the quest that has always accompanied the world's great myths and religions. In modern Western society most people do not have any clear or solid answer to that question. As Viktor Frankl found in a Nazi concentration camp, our deepest, rock-bottom need is not pleasure or power, but meaning and purpose, "a reason to live and a reason to die".

The tragedy of meaninglessness in our civilisation reflects the urgency of re-evangelisation in our times. "I should be punished if I did not preach the Gospel," writes St Paul in the second reading. Our times are wounded, perhaps more than any other period in history. Humanity has been led to believe more in self-determination, to dream of heaven on earth, while true heaven is considered as no more than pie in the sky.

But as Jonathan Sacks writes, "We have become lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfillment." For this very reason, the crisis of meaning that marks our times is a moral drama, a vacuum of hope. Like the reality surrounding Jesus, we are again experiencing what it means to be part of what are called 'crowds of solitudes'.

Religion, it has been said, "is good for making you happy, or else it's good for nothing". In the context of St Paul's statement that preaching the Gospel is a duty laid on us, can we today rediscover the profoundly therapeutic meaning of religion for culture and society? As the Gospel amply shows today, the healing of the whole person is at the very core of Jesus' message. Both the readings from Job and Mark seem to highlight for us the relation between the Christian faith and the health of mankind.

Even words like those we read from Job, from which a tragic nihilism transpires, are words of Scripture. They express what we in our culture call existential anguish. Because even spiritual emptiness, as happened with Job and with the great mystics throughout the ages, can result in a golden opportunity for deepening one's relationship with God.

At the heart of each one of us, there is a terrible sense of nakedness, inner poverty and emptiness that often frightens us and makes us hide from God and other people. This is what Simone Weil aptly called that sacred "sense of absence" which, when intensely experienced and accepted, may become the meeting place between the soul and the transcendence of God.