Sermon XX. Good Use Of Sickness. (For The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost.)

Ecclesiasticus xxxviii. 9. [USCCB: Sirach xxxviii. 9.] "My son, in thy sickness neglect not thyself, but pray to the Lord, and he shall heal thee."

The Gospel of the day relates the miracle of the healing of the ruler's son. That this man had the right kind of faith which pleases God, and obtains extraordinary favors from His hand, is shown by the promptitude of his belief in what our Lord said to him. Although he had urged and insisted upon our Lord's going down to Capharnaum with him, yet, no sooner did he hear the words, "Go thy way, thy son liveth," than he immediately returned home alone without further doubt or remonstrance.

I do not think, my brethren, that we exercise enough of this faith in God in our sicknesses; not, understand me, that we are to look for miraculous cures of our ailments and diseases, or that we are to condemn ourselves for want of faith if our prayers for relief are not answered on a sudden; but what I mean is, that we too often misapprehend the cause of our sicknesses, and do not make the good use of them we might. Let me say a few words which may be for our instruction and edification on these points.

In any event, whatever may be the direct cause of our sickness, it is, after all, the will of God. If we fall sick through our own culpable neglect or criminal excesses, it is still the will of God. We have, in this, disturbed the good order of His Providence, and suffer the natural consequences of it. There are, besides, those countless forms of disease and phases of ill health which afflict us, and which we are not able to trace to any fault of ours. We fall sick, and cannot tell how or why. An invisible hand has touched us at a moment we knew not, and our strength is gone, the light has fled from our eyes, and the color from our cheek. A secret poison has insinuated itself into our blood, and dried up the fountains of health and vigor. Fierce and rapid in its destruction, a week, a day, or even a few hours suffice to bring us to the point of death, and shatter the boasted glory of our strength. Then, if the danger passes and the prospect of returning health smiles upon us, we have yet to pass through the long and tedious days and nights of convalescence, gathering but slowly, and with great labor and suffering, that which we lost so quickly and so easily.

The first and most necessary truth for a Christian to reflect upon in the time of sickness is that, in some way or other, God's hand is in it, and that the stroke falls either in chastisement, in mercy, or as a special favor and blessing. We must never forget that life is given to us with all its vicissitudes of joy and sorrow, of prosperity and adversity, of pains and pleasures, more because of eternity than on its own account. Sickness comes in its proper turn at fitting times as a part of the life that we are to lead here below; and when it is good for us, then God sends it. He has ends in view that we may be wholly ignorant of. He knows our souls well and watches over them, and a Christian ought to believe that he is never sick in body but for the sake of the health of his soul.

But some one may say that is bringing sickness, health, and the like within the pale of religion. "O ye sons of men! how long will ye be dull of heart? Why do you love vanity, and seek after lying?" We are cunning enough in the ways of the world, but why so slow to understand the ways of God? Is there anything that we are, or have, or can be that is not of God? Why forever trying to lie to ourselves, and leave Him out of account? Are we sick or well, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, honored or despised, that God does not know it, has not so appointed it, and has not good reasons for it? And is not the referring of any or all of the states of our being to Him an act of religion?

The truth is, my brethren, that the manner in which one receives and bears an attack of illness is a good test of one's religion. You will see some giving away to inordinate fear and anxiety upon the approach of the first symptoms of disease. They are not in the habit of referring even their health to God, or of thanking Him for it. They imagine they live of themselves. So, when they feel their own strength leaving them, and are forced to say—I can hold up myself no longer, then terror seizes upon them, as if all aid, human or divine, was wanting, because they can no longer help themselves.

See, too, how the positively irreligious and wicked man generally acts in the commencement of sickness. He talks about his fate, his ill-luck, and curses it. He utters incoherent cries of impatience, and is full of anxiety to discover the act of indiscretion on his own part, or the fault of others, through which he has fallen ill.

But the true Christian, whose soul is prepared for tribulation, with whom God is no stranger in the time of health, recognizes instantly the hand of God when that health is threatened. With holy Job, he exclaims: "If we have received good things at the hand of God, why should we not receive evil?" [Footnote 108]

He may be surprised, as all are, at the unlooked-for blow, but there is no sign of angry complaint or of envious repining. It is all right, he says, God knows best. This one thought satisfies his heart, God knows about it. He knows why He sends it. He knows how long it will last; how much I shall suffer, and how it will end. May His holy will be done!

You see, my brethren, that what I desire to impress upon your minds is that, in all sickness, from whatever cause, the will of God is to be acknowledged. It is not every Christian, I regret to say, who does so look upon it. Too often you will find it regarded as a grievous misfortune, having no good reason why it should be, and without any compensation for the loss of worldly enjoyment and advantages which it necessarily entails; and, even if they do agree that God has sent it, then it is because God is angry with them. He is taking vengeance upon them. There appears to be no other possible reason that can be given for it.

As I said before, we are afflicted with sickness not only as a chastisement for sin, but sometimes also in mercy, as an act of loving-kindness and forethought on the part of God; and again very frequently, as in the case of holy Job, as an opportunity to try our faith, to enable us to show our constancy and love to God, and is therefore to be looked upon as a mark of predilection, and a positive blessing and grace.

Certainly, sickness is sometimes sent as a punishment for sin. It comes as a natural and just consequence of sinful excesses. Look at the drunkard and the debauchee. They have gone on for awhile in seeming impunity, but every debauch was a blow struck upon the citadel of life and health. Soon it is shattered, and totters and falls into ruin. Go into the streets, and you may meet them, with haggard faces and trembling limbs. Go to the hospitals and the insane asylums, and see those wrecks of humanity, almost soulless men and women, drivelling idiots, and sickening masses of corruption. Go to many a sick bedside, in palace or in hovel, in this great city, and you may see how sin is punished by an outraged God. And, though you yourself could not trace the fever that blighted you for many long weeks to any natural cause, you know that you deserved it all. Your alarmed conscience did not fail to tell you that there were crimes of your life that demanded retribution. Your overweening pride, your ungovernable anger, has been humbled in the dust. Your days are shortened because of your disobedience and cruelty to your parents. The money you have stolen and would not restore has been wrested from you by the heavy charges of your illness. Your disorderly appetites and lusts are now punished with compulsory and exhausting fasts from all food. "He hath struck you as being wicked, in open sight; who as it were on purpose hath revolted from Him, and would not understand His ways: so that you have caused the cry of the needy to come up before Him, and He has heard the voice of the poor." [Footnote 109]

You thought in your sin that you were stronger than God. Now He has rebuked you by sorrow on the sick bed, and has made all your bones to wither. Bread is become abominable to you, and to your soul the meat which before you desired. You have trampled on God's holy law; you would not go to Mass to worship Him. Now, though you would gladly go any distance, and suffer any pain to be present at it, you are denied that joy and consolation. You are as one upon whom the church doors are closed, for whom the altar is thrown down, and the priest departed. "In whatsoever a man sins," says the Holy Scripture, "in that also shall he be punished."

Sickness has come upon you. Why? In mercy, God sees how indifferent you have become to Him. He sees how your soul has become absorbed in worldly things. Your heart is following after strange gods, and your footsteps are leading down to hell. As Eliu said to Job, "Your guardian angel has spoken to God for you, and said, Deliver him, that he may not go down to corruption." and God in mercy has heard his prayers, and your way is stopped. It is because God loves you, and would save you, that this has come upon you. In the days of pain, and during the long, feverish nights, you will remember God. In your anguish you will turn to Him for comfort, and in your fear you will put your trust in Him. This world has had too much of your heart. On a sick bed you will be able to judge how much it is worth. You will condemn the vanity of your life. The past will be repented of. New resolutions will be made. You will come back to health with a refreshed and chastened spirit. What the friend of Job said to him, you will say of yourself: "My flesh is consumed with punishments, that I may return to the days of my youth. I will pray to God, and He will be gracious to me: and I shall see His face with joy. When I look upon men, I shall say, I have sinned, and indeed I have offended, and I have not received what I deserved, hath delivered my soul from going into destruction, that it may live and see the light." [Footnote 110]

Yes, my dear brethren, I think this is the cause of a great deal of the sickness that is sent upon us. The fever, the cholera, the accident, are good preachers, and they make themselves heard. I do not wonder, then, to see men compelled to listen to their threatening tones, and their souls terrified at their menacing gestures of death, and their eloquent descriptions of the coffin and the grave. The words of God's appointed preacher fall unheeded upon their ears. As long as they have strength enough to hear us, they have courage enough to disobey us. But God shows them a vision of a newly made grave, and causes their feet to totter upon its brink, that they may not go down into it unabsolved.

O blessed sickness! how many wandering souls have you not brought back to a forgotten God! How many almost lost have you not snatched from the jaws of hell! God is a kind and thoughtful Father to us, when we often think Him a hard and cruel Master. Like a surgeon, the deeper and more hidden the wound, the more resolutely does he cut down upon it, and lay it open, in order to effect a radical cure. He chastises us in mercy here, that He may spare us at His judgment-seat in the day of His wrath.

Why are you sick, you who have no grievous crimes to expiate—you whose whole heart has belonged to God this many a day? Because you are the object of His special graces, and a chosen vessel of election. What is the secret of this apparent contradiction? God wishes to try you, and prove your constancy. Not that He doubts you. On the contrary, He knows how true your heart is. He has every confidence in your fidelity. But He wishes to glorify that fidelity. He wishes to give you a chance to show that you can trust Him in the darkness as well as in the light. He strikes you, that you may have glorious wounds to show at the last day. Do you not know that to suffer for any one is to give a better proof of love than to confer favors and benefits? You have done a good deal for God, I know. He does not forget it. He asks you to give up that which it is the hardest thing in the world to sacrifice—your health. It seems the most unreasonable thing to sacrifice. Your friends and neighbors pity you. They know how much good you were able to do when you were strong and well. They regret to see your usefulness cut off. That usefulness was your constant self-sacrifice for the good of your neighbor. They would like to see that go on. They forget that God wants you to do a little self-sacrifice for Him, for Him alone, just as if there were no one in existence except you and He in the whole universe. This is why you are sick and suffering. Rejoice, then, O Christian sufferer! and bear your cross, not only with patience and resignation, but with holy joy and a thankful heart. Your labors are accepted in His sight, and only this is yet wanting to you—the merit of suffering for Him.

My brethren, this is, I well know, a strange doctrine in the ears of the world, and especially to the unbelieving world around us in our day. Meritorious suffering is something which our Protestant friends not only do not comprehend, but laugh at, so that to most of them, even the very passion and death of our Lord is an enigma. They may believe it, but it is an unreasonable belief on their part, for they ridicule the very principle upon which its reasonableness is founded.

The Catholic Church teaches us that there is a merit in suffering, in voluntary mortification, in fasting and abstinence, in giving up the world, its friendships and its pleasures; that it is meritorious and pleasing to God for the priest and the virgin to deny themselves the joys and comforts of the married state; in a word, that God is glorified as well by suffering as by act. This is her principle. It is the only principle which can give any reasonable explanation of the atoning sacrifice of our Lord, and to deny it is to deny Christ.

Accidental, or rather Providential, suffering, such as we have in sickness, is turned to the same account, and sanctified by our offering it to God in the spirit of sacrifice; for it is not in the act of suffering itself, but in the will, that merit is obtained.

Now, my brethren, you see in what spirit we should receive and endure sickness. The will should accept it at once, calmly, willingly, without murmur or complaint. It is God's will. That should be sufficient. Our own will must respond and make an entire and generous offering of it. In the beginning of sickness, then, let us say, O my God! I accept this at your hands with all the pain I shall suffer, whatever may be the reason you have so willed it, in satisfaction for my sins, as an admonition to lead a better life, and as a happy chance to suffer something for your sake in union with the sufferings of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Help me by your grace to profit by it as you desire.

While the sickness lasts, let us often look back upon God, as a gallant knight upon a perilous journey thinks upon his liege lord, whose behests are his law, and whose honor is in his hands, renewing again and again our first fervent offering and oath of fidelity. There will be times when we need to think upon God—times of trial and temptation, when nothing but the thought of God will support us. For there are moments of suffering, when our nearest and dearest friends are dumb in our presence; when the friendly hand, uncertain, stops and hesitates before us, fearing lest too rudely it may draw aside the veil that shrouds our anguish—agonizing moments when all human thought and language dies upon the threshold. Happy the soul who then knows whither to turn for that longed-for comfort which the world in its weakness cannot give! Happy is he who has learned the secret of sanctifying suffering! For such the Lord's words have a meaning: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted."

These thoughts and the lessons they teach appear to my mind not inappropriate to the season through which we are passing. Nature is putting on her autumn garb of sombre tints, telling us that her strength and beauty are passing away, and that her days of brightness are declining. The woods, once vocal with the song of birds, now begin to look lonely and deserted. Their stillness is broken only by the rustling fall of the dry and withered leaves, like the stealthy and hushed footsteps heard in the sick chamber. The sighing of the winds through the branches robbed of their crown of verdure is mournful in the ears of the listener, as the low, dreamy moanings in a sick man's sleep. They both speak of decay and whisper of death. Of those of us, my brethren, for whom God is preparing the couch of sickness, against whose sight the light of day will be shut out, and upon whose prostrate form the shadows of suffering will soon fall, some will rise and walk forth in the warm sunshine of a hopeful spring, and some, like the fallen leaves, will never flourish again, but lie, like them, to crumble, decay, and mingle with the dust. Their white pall of the winter snow shall also be ours. The fierce winter storm shall howl its doleful requiem over our heads as it passes by, but we shall not heed it. The earth shall smile in beauty again, but not for us.

Oh! be it for us as it may—God knoweth! it will be well for us to have thought upon sickness, and to have prepared our souls for the trial. If health be again granted to us, we shall return to it again all the better for having known how to receive it and how to improve its time. If not, then, when our name shall have become a memory, and our form a vision of the never-returning past, we shall look back from the further shore of the dark river of death over which we have passed, and be glad that we learned how to lean upon God in those last dreadful hours in life, glad that we offered to Him beforehand the willing sacrifice of health and strength and life, and thus ascended from the altar of the bed of suffering, as a victim of acceptable merit in the sight of Him who rewards, more than tongue can tell, the least we ever do or suffer for His sake.