“All will be well” — Thirteenth Week of “Ordinary Time,” July 1 to 7, 2012

Sunday’s reading begins, “God did not make death.” But the truth is, we blame him for it. We blame him for sin too. Julian of Norwich wrote that, before God taught her, “In my foolishness I often wondered why, through the great foreseeing wisdom of God, sin was not prevented. For it seemed to me that then all would have been well.”

God could have kept sin from happening. Why didn’t he? Jesus answered her with three shocking words: “Sin is necessary.”

He didn’t mean sin itself. He was talking about what Julian was complaining of: all the suffering and sorrow sin causes on earth; the terrible things people do that their victims blame God for, including sometimes things they do to themselves.

Julian saw that “all which is not good” actually contributes to our good. “The shameful contempt and complete denial of himself that Jesus endured for us... all the pains and passions, spiritual and bodily, of all his creatures... this pain is something for a time. It purges us and makes us know ourselves and ask for mercy.”

There are recovering alcoholics who bless the day they “hit bottom” so hard it woke them up and made them turn to AA and to a “higher power.”

In this context Jesus spoke to Julian the words she is famous for: “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” God can be happy in spite of the sin and suffering in the world, because he sees an ending that is not just happy but perfect. “All will be well. All will be well. And every manner of thing will be well.”

That is the bottom line; just as resurrection was the bottom line of Jesus’ passion and death. And resurrection should be the first and bottom line of every Christian life on earth.

We should rise out of bed every morning as we rose out of the waters of Baptism: to let Jesus rise from the dead in our bodies, As soon as we wake, we should embrace consciously the mystery of our Baptism: “Jesus, I give you my body. Live this day with me, live this day in me, live this day through me.”

This should be the first line, the bottom line, and the repeated line we speak all during the day. “Lord, do this with me, do this in me, do this through me.” By Baptism we “became Christ.” This is the mystery of our life. We live to think with his thoughts, speak with his words, and act as his body on earth.

If we do this, “All will be well. All will be well. And every manner of thing will be well.”

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