Robert Barron - A Thorn in the Flesh
Peace be with you. Friends, for this Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to do something I don't do that often, and that's to talk about the second reading. It's from Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians, and it's so magnificent and it's so spiritually rich that I just can't overlook it. It's toward the end of the letter, and Paul, in this kind of oblique, strange way, he speaks of himself but in the third person, about being lifted up, whether he's in his body or not, he doesn't know, whatever that means, lifted up to the third heaven. In other words, he's been given some extraordinary mystical experience, some mystical elevation, and you find similar things, you know, in Thomas Aquinas and Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and many of the other mystics.
So not altogether surprising that someone like St. Paul would've had this sort of extraordinary union with God. But that's not the focus of the reading. The focus now is on something else. Paul says, "That I might not become too elated," because of these extraordinary revelations, what? "A thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan to beat me, to keep me from becoming too elated". So he's at the height, he's up to the third heaven in this mystical union with God, but as a balance, as a kind of spiritual counterweight, he's given this thorn in the flesh.
Now, what was it? Clearly not some passing problem, like a difficulty of the day. No, no. Think of a thorn that's just stuck in your flesh and it's just bugging you. Think of a stone in your shoe that's just bothering you all the time. What was it? Well, people speculate. There are little hints in Paul's letters of difficulty in speech. He says at one point, well, people always say his letters are so impressive, which of course, indeed they are, but in person, he's so unimpressive. What did that mean? We don't know. Did it mean that he didn't speak very well? Maybe, like Moses, he was stammering or halting in his speech.
Was it a physical problem of some kind? I mean, maybe. Imagine back in the day, ancient times before we had the doctors in hospitals, a lot of people would've had kind of chronic medical issues. Was it a psychological suffering of some kind? Was it the persecution he faced regularly? I don't know. Whatever it was, as I say, it wasn't trivial. Now, how do we know? Listen: "Three times I begged the Lord that it might leave me". To say three times in the biblical context doesn't mean just three times (one, two, three) it means again and again and again he begged the Lord.
Now I know this is true based on my life experience, every single person listening to me right now has something like this. I say without hesitation. I don't mean the passing troubles of the day. I mean some suffering in you, physical, psychological, spiritual, I don't know what it is, but some suffering in you that's chronic, that is deeply troubling, annoying, disturbing, and that you have spent your whole life asking God to take away from you. That's the thorn in the flesh. That's what Paul is feeling, and he's begging God to take it away. You know, I made reference before to this that I love history and biography. It's my favorite books to read. And it's become almost a little game that I play when I'm reading the biography of a great person is find the thorn in the flesh.
So you're, you know, following the story of someone, their childhood and their education and this and that happened to them. Okay. But trust me, you're going to find the thorn in the flesh. There's going to be some suffering, some pain, listen now, probably around which that person's life effectively revolves. I'll give you a couple examples. You know, two heroes of mine, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, they had a lot in common, the two of them. But one thing they had in common: they both suffered from what today we call depression. In Lincoln's time, probably "melancholia". Churchill called it the "Black Dog" Sometimes, he said, the Black Dog was on me. It just meant this kind of debilitating depression. Jefferson, too, probably suffered from something similar. It manifested itself as migraine headaches for Jefferson. But for Lincoln and Churchill, for sure.
Now, they weren't debilitated. They would never have had the careers they had if they were just debilitated. But nevertheless, when the Black Dog was on Churchill, I mean he was just beset by it. When Lincoln fell into one of his melancholic episodes, thorn in the flesh, you bet. Another good example is Sir Laurence Olivier. Now, maybe I'm dating myself because younger people won't even know that name, but when I was coming of age, if you had said, "Who's the greatest actor in the world"? people probably would've said Laurence Olivier, great Shakespearean actor, also starred in Hollywood films. Greatest actor in the world, Olivier. But when he was at midlife, like in early fifties, this man who had grown up on the stage since he was a kid, suddenly developed truly debilitating stage fright.
Like, I can't talk, like, I'm so nervous, like, I'm stammering out my words. And you think stage fright? What happened to him? Who knows? But it could have been the audiences are expecting the greatest actor in the world. Can you imagine the pressure on you every time you stride out on the stage? "Hey, hey, he's the best actor in the world". If you gave even slightly less than wonderful performance, people would be disappointed. Who knows? Maybe that produced in him this anxiety. Here's the interesting thing though about Olivier. You watch his earlier performances (you find them on YouTube) he played Hamlet, he played Richard III, and Henry V, and so on, and he's wonderful, of course, but there's something, I don't know, kind of stylized, a little bit theatrical.
But look at the later Olivier after he'd been through this trial, this thorn in the flesh. Look at a movie like "Sleuth". Look it up. Great film with Michael Caine. Look at "Marathon Man," he did with Dustin Hoffman. Something about that Olivier that's just, I don't know, it's more human, it's a more compelling performance. Was it the result of his struggle with this terrible thorn in the flesh? Maybe. You know, one that came to our attention, just what, about twenty years ago now, Mother Teresa, the greatest living saint when I was coming of age. If Olivier was the greatest actor, who was the greatest living saint? It would be Mother Teresa of Calcutta, always with a smile, always joyfully doing her work among the poor.
Now we know, for about fifty years, most of her life, she had a terrible thorn in the flesh, and it had to do with a sense of the absence of God. What do you mean the absence of God? You're a saint! Yeah, but she said she felt God's absence. They say when she's praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament at times she would say to her sisters, "But where is Jesus"? In her letters, it's just awful experiences communicated of feeling abandoned by God. Strange, isn't it? I mean, what gave Mother Teresa her tremendous identification with the poor and suffering? Might it have been particularly that thorn in the flesh?
See, now we come to the point really. Why would God permit this? Well, Paul says, to keep me from becoming too elated. So he was caught up in the third heaven. So as a kind of balancing act. But we might look at a couple perspectives, everybody. What is it, at least in this life, that throws us most into the arms of God? "Oh, well, it's my great accomplishments. When all's going well and I'm a hero and everybody admires me". Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's very often in this life (in heaven it'll be otherwise) but in this life, it's very often my suffering, my fear, my anguish, my anxiety, my pain, things I can't control, listen, that throw me off of my ego and into the arms of God.
See, what causes reliance upon God? Is it the humility born of this kind of suffering? Yeah, I think very often that's the case. I've been referring to some famous people here, but talk to anyone you know. Chances are they will start speaking about the thorn in their flesh and how it led them to God and how they never would've come to God were it not that thorn in the flesh. You know the story, Fulton Sheen tells it about Clare Boothe Luce, who was a congresswoman and she's married to Henry Luce, the great publisher of "Time" and "Life" magazine. She was a woman about town, this very accomplished, famous, beautiful woman, and her daughter whom she loved dearly was killed in a car wreck tragically, and she fell into a despair.
It was during that time that she started to see Fulton Sheen, exploring the Catholic faith, and she took in several lessons until finally Sheen spoke to her about the goodness of God. And she shouted at him, "If God is good, why would he have taken my daughter from me"? And Sheen, they say without missing a beat, said, "Perhaps because in your suffering, you'd be led back to him".
So it goes in the order of grace, very often; it's the thorn in the flesh that brings us back to God. What does Paul say? Listen: "But he" the Lord, when Paul begged him, "he said, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.'" That's what we're talking about. See, it's not worldly power. Worldly power is opposed to weakness. That's true. But spiritual power that comes from union with God, that comes precisely through weakness.
Now, here's a second, I'll close with this, a second perspective. What's the image that Paul held up to his first listeners that we hold up in front of every Christian community? Is it an image of worldly power and success? Hardly. It's a deeply wounded man rising in pain on an instrument of torture just before he dies. That's the image we place before our eyes and our minds. How come? Because in that suffering, the world is saved, right, through his wounds. "By his stripes, we are healed". Here's, friends, something very mystical, and I can't explain it to you really coherently, but I think it's true. Namely, that our suffering when joined to that of Christ has a similarly salvific effect.
[b]Let me say that again. When we take our suffering, John Paul II was insistent upon this, we take our suffering, we join it to that of Christ, it has a saving effect somewhere it has a saving effect somewhere within the Mystical Body. Paul says that we make up what's still lacking in the sufferings of Christ. By our own suffering, we participate in the salvation of the cross. That's why even as we beg "O Lord, take this thorn away from me," he says, "No, no. No, no. My grace is sufficient because in that weakness you're thrown back into my arms". In that very weakness, you are participating in the saving cross of Jesus. And God bless you.[b/]