The reward of suffering: 8th Tuesday of the year

“Jesus said, “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.”(Mk 10:29,30)

Indeed, I do not know of anyone who can believe the issue about the recompense. All who have left everything for the sake of the gospel, can attest that they have received a hundred times over.

Perhaps the curious peculiarity of Mark’s gospel is, not only the detailed mention of houses, brother, sisters, etc, but the interesting addition of persecutions.

The kingdom of God is not something that brings more advantages if it is pursued. We do not pursue the kingdom of God so that we can have a hundredfold reward of earthly securities. If we did that, the kingdom of God would be a means to an end: A trade of momentary insecurity for the guarantee of a hundredfold recompense. Persecutions come with the package.

We do not weigh the advantages with the disadvantages of leaving everything for the kingdom of God. The kingdom is in itself the recompense. The hundredfold is a foretaste of the future reward and the persecutions the toll of the world.

After all, the world is not yet ready to receive the message of the Gospel. The world resists the gospel, and its preachers receive that opposition completing the sufferings of Christ (Paul)–not because those sufferings lack in any thing, but because the world is lacking in readiness. Suffering comes in the package.

Philip Neri

One of the most celebrated members of the Oratory, Cardinal Newman, said of him,

“he contemplated as the idea of his mission, not the propagation of the faith, nor the exposition of doctrine, nor the catechetical schools; whatever was exact and systematic pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armor of his king…. He came to the Eternal City and he sat himself down there, and his home and his family gradually grew up around him, by the spontaneous accession of materials from without. He did not so much seek his own as draw them to him. He sat in his small room, and they in their gay, worldly dresses, the rich and the wellborn, as well as the simple and the illiterate, crowded into it. In the mid-heats of summer, in the frosts of winter still was he in that low and narrow cell at San Girolamo, reading the hearts of those who came to him, and curing their souls’ maladies by the very touch of his hand…. And they who came remained gazing and listening till, at length, first one and then another threw off their bravery, and took his poor cassock and girdle instead; or, if they kept it, it was to put haircloth under it, or to take on them a rule of life, while to the world they looked as before.”