Our first reading today from the book of Numbers began with the words:

“With their patience worn out by the journey…the people complained against God and Moses”

Their patience was worn out…

At this point in the story, the Israelites had been wandering in the desert now for quite some time after being led out of slavery in the land of Egypt. The journey had started off with very high hopes… the thought of the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey had bolstered them and encouraged them. They saw God’s power fighting for them. They saw the Red Sea split in two. They saw signs and wonders. Everything was going their way… 

But now… they were in the middle of a desert with little hope for food and water.

And their patience was officially worn out.

“We are disgusted with this wretched food,” they cried out! We’re FED UP… DISGUSTED… OUR PATIENCE IS WORN OUT.

This is very fitting for us to hear today. Because when I look at our poor world, I can tell you:

Our patience is wearing out.

A woman minding her own business… riding home on public transportation.

Little kids praying at a school mass at the start of a brand new academic year.

A man hosting a public debate and exercising his freedom of speech.

These are just a few of the most recent, most publicized casualties of our very very very sick world.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m very angry.

And I’m very sad.

I’m tired of our flag out in the front of our church flying at half-staff.

I’m deeply… deeply troubled by the vile words, the laughing, the “you-had-it-coming-to-you” posts, the political lecturing, the virtue signaling, the snide remarks, the outright CELEBRATION in far too many cases… some of the monstrous posts I saw of people rejoicing that Charlie Kirk was assassinated are nothing short of demonic… Absolutely heartbreaking.

I’m just tired.

And I don’t know about you, but my patience is just about worn out.

But… in this place of vulnerability, we all need to pause and ask:

How ought we as Catholics respond to all these sorrowful, gut-wrenching events? How should we as Catholic believers — disciples of Jesus — respond to the great evils that do exist in this fallen world?

In a word: 

We look to the Cross of Jesus.

Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross. And how fitting, how providential that this feast happens to fall on a Sunday this year…

The Church directs our gaze — up at the Cross.

This is the Truth: The Cross is the only adequate antidote for the poison of our age and every age. It is the only efficacious cure for our sickness.

The Cross alone perfectly confronts and disarms the three most common, most worldly responses to evil that we are seeing on full display right now.

And those three responses are:

1. Wrath

2. Revenge

3. And Resentment

Let’s look at each one of these, and see how the Cross of Jesus contradicts and disarms them.

First, wrath.

Simply put: We are not allowed, as Christians, to give in to wrath. Wrath is one of the Seven Deadly sins. It is a volcanic eruption of out of control emotion and caustic rage that silences, destroys, and damages people around us and poisons our own soul in the process. Wrath is a violent outburst of fuming storm clouds, causing more confusion, more darkness, more torment, more fuel for retaliation, and more blindness.

Wrath is, of course, not to be confused with righteous anger. Anger, rightly ordered, is the proper response to evil. We should feel angry when bad things happen, and we need to be able to acknowledge and process that anger. Anger, if it is processed well with careful discernment, can even empower us to take action with clear-headed promptness and energy. Anger can help us get things accomplished. “Be angry, and do not sin” the Scriptures tell us…

But wrath is never allowed. It is never ok.

St Hildegard once said it this way: “When anger tries to burn up my tabernacle, I will look to the goodness of God, Whom anger never touched… And when hatred tries to darken me, I will look to the mercy and the martyrdom of the Son of God.”

On the Cross, Jesus was not filled with wrath. No, he was filled with sorrow, with love, and perhaps even a kind of holy anger at how far his beloved people had fallen — “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”… not to condemn the world, or vent wrath upon the people of the world, but to SAVE them from tearing themselves apart!!!

The 2nd response that is not open to us as Catholics is Revenge.

Revenge is when we lash out in response to an attack — When we take matters into our own hands, use violence to counter violence… and try to match the ferocity and means that our enemies are using against us! An eye for an eye — tooth for a tooth! It’s only fair, right?

Wrong!

“Love your enemies, do good to them. Bless your persecutors! Bless, do not curse!”

This is fundamentally different from how our world ordinarily works. It’s so easy to demand blood for blood, or be tricked into think that’s the only way we will ever get through to people. I was troubled by the words our president had to say with regard to that poor woman who was killed down in Charlotte the other week. He said this:

“We have to be vicious, just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand.”

Now I want to make one thing absolutely clear: I do not share this quote to take any particular political stance or to single out any particular politician. Lord knows, the political discourse in this country right now is miserably vengeful and poisonous all around, and I could have just as easily cherry-picked an equally disturbing quote from the “other side.” But I share this quote to make what I consider a simple, but very important point:

We actually don’t have to be vicious.

It’s always a choice to be vicious, and it’s always the wrong one.

We can be clear, firm, strong, and uncompromising on our principles… We can and should hold people responsible for their actions… but always without being vicious. Always without taking revenge upon those who have done evil.

Jesus, as we all know, was not soft on sin. He was not wishy-washy when it came to the reality of evil… But he was also never vicious. 

On the Cross, he prayed: “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

Third: Catholics cannot respond with resentment.

Resentment is very closely aligned with despair. When we become resentful, what we’re really doing is despairing that the person who hurt us will ever be able to change, ever repent, ever be converted. We sort of “lock them into” their present state of soul. And we close our hearts off to the possibility of forgiveness.

Fr Mike Schmitz in an interview following the murder of Charlie Kirk warned us very powerfully not to allow the anger we feel to “settle” and “harden” into resentment. He compared resentment to cement that dries and becomes unable to move any longer.

This is so true. Resentment prevents us from moving forward.

On the Cross, Jesus holds absolutely no resentment towards the centurions who beat him, stripped him, put nails through his wrists… And because he refused to settle into resentment, at least one of those centurions was able to change his mind in the end, and after Jesus breathed his last said in awe: “Truly, this was the Son of God!”

How we all doing?

I know this is hard stuff. The Cross doesn’t make much sense. Wrath, revenge, and resentment come so much more naturally for us sinners. 

But we’re called to be better. 

We’re called to imitate Jesus, who “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”

If your patience is worn out, that’s ok.

Look to the Cross.

The Cross was Jesus’ ultimate mission and goal. It was His ultimate accomplishment… And as Christ himself said: “It is finished.”

“It is accomplished. It is consummated.”

As Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said: “Every other person who ever came into this world came into it to live. Jesus came into it to die.”

That’s why we don’t call today’s feast “The Tragedy of the Cross” but the TRIUMPH… The EXALTATION of the Holy Cross!!!

Jesus has already mysteriously dealt with all the evil ever perpetrated in all fo history… by willingly dying.

He refused to respond with wrath, revenge, and resentment to all the evils of this world, the evils inside of human hearts!!!! 

He answered instead with loving obedience to the Father.

And because of this, God greatly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name

that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that

Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.”

Amen.