TH E HEALING POWER OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED

Homily for Feb. 4th, 2018: 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. 

           Job 7:1-4, 6-7; Mark 1:29-39.

AIM:  To help the hearers be open to the healing power of Christ, God’s personal

          Word to us.

 

          Do you ever suffer from sleeplessness? If so, you will be able to sympathize with Job, complaining in our first reading: “Troubled nights have been allotted to me. If in bed, I ask, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on; I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.”

          The people we see thronging around Jesus in today’s gospel reading suffered from ailments far worse than insomnia. According to the ideas of that pre-scientific age, their ills were due to demons. “When it was evening, after sunset,” Mark writes, “they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons. The whole town was gathered at the door.”

          Jesus was constantly surrounded by crowds like that. They flocked to him because they had heard of his miraculous healings. They regarded Jesus as a sensational wonder-worker.

          Jesus was clearly unhappy with this role. We see that at two points in today’s gospel. First, when Simon Peter tries to persuade Jesus to resume his work of healing the next morning, Jesus refuses. He explains that his real task is not to heal, but to preach. “Let us go to the nearby villages that I may preach there also.  For this purpose have I come.”

          We find a second indication of Jesus’ unhappiness with the role of wonder-worker in Mark’s words: “He cured many who were sick with various diseases, and he drove out many demons, not permitting them to speak because they knew him.” In this gospel according to Mark the first person who is permitted to proclaim Jesus’ true identity publicly is the Roman military officer in charge at Calvary. He saw Jesus not as a wonder-worker, but as a common criminal suffering a death which, to us, is ghastly in its cruelty, but which, to this hardened soldier, was routine. Yet something in this criminal’s bearing moved that nameless Roman officer to say, following Jesus’ death: “Clearly this man was the Son of God!” (Mk 15:39)

          How do you regard Jesus Christ?  Do you see him as a wonder-worker?  Someone with supernatural powers who offers you a quick fix, who can get you out of a jam and rescue you when you are in over your head?

          We encounter Jesus Christ here in the Eucharist: in his word, and in the sacrament of his body and blood. He does not come to us, however, as a wonder-worker with a quick fix for all our problems. We encounter him as that Roman officer at Calvary encountered him: crucified in weakness.

          Yet we also encounter Jesus here as that officer did not. In the Eucharist he comes us as the risen Lord. At Easter he did not come back from death to his old life, like Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Jesus was raised from his tomb to a new life: one no longer subject to death. In the resurrection Jesus was raised to eternal life, beyond death. 

          This crucified-and-risen Lord comes to us here in the Eucharist not with a  quick fix, but with the healing power of God’s life-giving word. Indeed Jesus is God’s Word: his living, personal communication to us. The sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, says: “The Father spoke one Word, which is his Son, and this word he speaks always in eternal silence; and in silence it must be heard by the soul.” And the contemporary British Carmelite nun, Ruth Burrows, expands this saying by writing: “God gave all that God had to give in giving us Jesus. God kept nothing back from us, not even God’s only Son, and in this gift of Jesus is the gift of the divine Self.”

          There is healing power in this crucified and risen Lord who is God’s Word.  Jesus heals us by telling us that God loves us; by assuring us that God is always close to us, no matter how far we may stray from him. St. John of the Cross writes: “God dwells and is present substantially in every soul, even though it may be the greatest sinner in the world” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk II, chap. 5, 3). There is healing in Jesus’ assurance that God accepts us in love just as we are; that he does not wait for us to become the ideal people we would like to be, before giving us his love.

          Jesus who is God’s personal Word tells us that God loves us enough to exchange his divine power for human weakness. We see this at Bethlehem, where Jesus was weak and vulnerable as all babies are. And we see it at Calvary, where Jesus accepted the weakness and the seeming final defeat of crucifixion.

          In reality, Jesus is so much more than a mere wonder-worker. He invites us to open ourselves to the healing power of his word: the word he came to proclaim, the Word he himself is, in his own person. As we listen to him who is God’s Word, God’s personal message to us of life and hope, Jesus invites us to be filled with a sense of awe and wonder at the greatness of God’s undeserved love for us. He invites us to respond to that love with a love of our own – by making him the center of our lives. For until we do, we will remain always unsatisfied, always unfulfilled, always restless. Why? No one has said it better than St. Augustine. He was writing out of his own experience when he said:

“You have made us for yourself, O God,  

and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.”