A Silent Stone in St. Peter's Square

Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Ezekiel 2.2-5 Psalm 123 2 Corinthians 12.7-10 Mark 6.1-6

For many years, there was a single red paving stone among the thousands of gray stones in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. No other markers, no indication that this red stone meant anything – for all anyone knew, it had been a mistake, just one stone of the wrong color that got mixed in accidentally. Today, that red stone is no longer there, but it has been replaced with a slightly larger piece of white marble with a coat of arms and a date inscribed on it: May 13, 1981. No other explanation, and still out of place – just one piece of white marble in a sea of dark gray paving stones. But if you would go to the internet or to history books and would look up the date on the stone, everything would suddenly make sense. Because it was on May 13, 1981, that Pope John Paul II was shot as he was moving through St. Peter’s Square, an assassination attempt that nearly took his life, but which he survived. Pope John Paul himself had the plain red stone placed at the exact spot in the square where he was shot – an almost invisible marker to the rest of the world, but full of meaning for the Holy Father himself. Now, after his death, Pope Benedict has had the red stone replaced with the larger piece of white marble that has Pope John Paul’s coat of arms and the date of the shooting. Still, no indication of why it is there, no explanation of why that spot or that date is important. Just a silent witness, a simple reminder of a dark moment in the history of the papacy.

The great writer Ernest Hemingway once said, “Life breaks all of us, but some of us are strong in the broken places.” Most of us can point to something in our own life story that has tried to break us, to weaken us, to tear us down and make us lose hope. For some, it is the sudden, shocking loss of a loved one to violence, or disease, or suicide. For some, it might be a diagnosis of cancer or a massive heart attack or the effects of a debilitating chronic disease. It might be the day a marriage fell apart or the day a child left to fight in a war or the day an employer told you that your job was being eliminated. Or maybe it’s not one particular thing, but more a general feeling of sorrow or depression or lack of purpose. Somehow, in some way, the circumstances of the world do their best to break us down, to take away the comfort and security and love that we think we know so well. Life breaks all of us, Hemingway said. It’s like the thorn in the flesh that St. Paul speaks of, the weakness that follows him throughout his life.

But both Hemingway and Paul saw something more in the brokenness, in the weakness that we face – they were both convinced that our weakness can make us strong, that our suffering can make us a better person. But how? How can weakness be a good thing? For Paul, the answer was straightforward – when we are broken down, when we are so weak that we can’t do anything on our own, we are forced to rely on God. When the depression or pain or loneliness takes over our lives, when there is no strength left in us, the only place we can find strength is in the love of Christ – and if we open ourselves to that love, then we will discover that God’s grace, God’s presence in our weakness will make us strong. The only way to be “strong in the broken places” is to surrender to God, to let God be our life, to let God be our hope, to let God be our strength.

Remember the stone in St. Peter’s Square: at first a blank red stone and now a white stone with a coat of arms and a date; that single stone speaks volumes in its silent witness. Because we know what happened after that day in 1981; we know that Pope John Paul did not become content in his brokenness but used that experience to become stronger. That single stone in the square marks the spot where the brokenness of one man was turned into strength, where the weakness of a gunshot wound was turned into love and forgiveness. Not by anything that a human being did, but by God himself. And the really good news is that it is not just for that one man who was shot in the Square – God will do the same thing for each of us, he will turn our brokenness into strength.