From the Pastor's Desk - September 7, 2025

Dear St. Martin’s Parishioners,

Why would God permit this? Why didn’t he intervene to stop it? We ask these types of questions after terrible tragedies like the one at Annunciation Parish and School in Minneapolis. It’s well and good to say that God didn’t do it and that he didn’t will it. Yet, it happened, and we know that God’s omniscience is total. Utterly evil and heinous acts rightly stop us in our tracks to ask the big questions concerning God, his goodness and his power over evil.

There is no simple, cut-and-dry answer that puts our questions to rest. At the heart of our faith is the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. All our questions must pass through this central event of human history. His Passion, Death and Resurrection is called the Paschal Mystery, and we use the word “mystery” to underscore that the truth contained in it is infinitely deep. We never reach the bottom of it. Right where it seems that God is most powerless—his Passion and Death—is where he is most active in defeating evil. God brings good out of evil, not by preventing it, but by taking on the effects of evil in Jesus’ body. God unites himself with our suffering fully. He then transforms the meaning and seemingly definitive nature of evil through the power of his Resurrection. Redemption is real and can account for the full scale of human evils. All human history, including our own, passes through the Paschal Mystery and finds it ultimate meaning in it.

I know from senseless evils that I have faced in my own life that God has brought good from them. It is not evident in the moment but only from a clearer vantage point after the fact. This doesn’t justify the evils committed or make them any less painful, but it does offer us a glimpse of God’s victory and the good’s superiority to evil. Suddenly, from the midst of our pain we become aware of an even greater power of love and strength. This the healing and new life that only grace can produce.

We live this Jubilee Year of Hope as realists, not as those helplessly succumbing to evil or needing to explain it away. Christian hope is so strong because it deals with the ultimate evil, the unjust crucifixion of the Son of God. From his death God has brought about our greatest good, eternal life. After the Resurrection, John proclaims—and we, with him - “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 Jn. 5:4-5)?

In Christ,

Fr. Dave