Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 13 / Sunday
Readings: Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24/ Psalm: 30:2, 4, 5-6, 11, 12, 13 (R/v 2a) / 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15 / Mark 5:21-43
“To be – for this he created all” (Wisdom 1.14)
To be alive. To be filled with life. To be able to share life. For this, God created all. This is the Good News we need to hear, particularly at this pandemic time. It resounds throughout today’s readings. We can indeed rejoice because “God did make man imperishable, he made him in the image of his own nature” (Wisdom 2.23). Yes, God created us for life.
Yet there are times when we experience lifelessness. Be it suffering or despair, confusion or disappointment, hurt or depression, and mostly when we sin, we know we are not fully alive – not really living as God would like us to.
The women in today’s Gospel reading remind us of this. Life is flowing out of the haemorrhaging woman's body. Life has gone out of the body of Jairus's daughter.
Yet, there is faith that life is indeed for them. The haemorrhaging woman reaches out to Jesus. Jairus comes to Jesus for his daughter. In response to their faith in him, power goes out of Jesus’s body, restoring them to life.
We resonate with both stories. We know God bestows life. We believe Jesus’ healing and forgiving actions gave life. Every day, we experience Jesus’s Spirit enabling us to live as God’s own. Even our desire to seek life and our struggle to stay alive is the blessed assurance that we are meant to live.
Isn’t this why we come to Eucharist to be fed and go to Confession to be forgiven? Isn’t this why many advocate for life, be it to save the unborn, protest against war and terrorism, fight unjust discrimination and demand the death penalty ends? Indeed, God commands that everyone should have life to the full.
Do we value God’s gift of life seriously? Maybe we don’t sufficiently because we are too comfortable with the goodness of Jesus as Saviour in our own lives. This is the maintenance attitude some of us have, and all of us also sometimes have.
We forget Jesus’s teaching: that God gives life. This should embolden us to make life better for ourselves and for all. The Samaritan woman realized this when she recognised Jesus as Saviour and proclaimed Jesus to all (John 4.4-42).
In seeking Jesus, Jairus and the sick woman should challenge us to live fully. They are not Jesus’s disciples. Yet they have faith in Jesus to heal and trust he will restore life. And Jesus does. Is our faith as strong and bold as theirs?
For Pope Francis, Jesus’ life-giving actions for the women teach that “no one should feel as an intruder, an interloper or one who has no right. To have access … to Jesus’ heart, there is only one requirement: to feel in need of healing and to entrust yourself to him” (Angelus, 1 July 2018).
Indeed, Christians must entrust ourselves to Jesus who shows us how to care for the life of others and Creation. Then what we hear today will flourish – that God created all things to exist and they are wholesome (Wisdom 1.14).
Christians have an obligation to care for all creation and everyone responsibly, especially those in need. Sharing what we have with those who have not is one way to care. For St Paul, in the second reading, this is how we strike a balance in society: everyone will have enough to live as God intends – saved, loved, redeemed.
Mercy must be our uniquely Christian way to do this. This can be challenging. As challenging as the demand this poem entitled “Advice to clergy; note to self” makes. It is for me, as I hope it will be for you, a good reminder that what we preach or pray for, we should not do so in words but really in deeds. Listen:
Today is World Refugee Day
If you are preaching … David,
do not forget his great grandma.
If you are preaching sea storms,
do forget those
who are facing rough crossings
and overfilled boats.
If you mention how the US
loves its Father’s Day,
do not forget families
broken at its southern border.
If you pray … well anything,
do not forget, ‘on earth
as it is in heaven.’
Indeed, the promised life in heaven is what Jesus made real on earth for all. As Jesus’s disciples, this is our task for everyone. It begins by letting Jesus take our hand to give us life like he did with the little girl.
Do we have the faith to touch and be touched by Jesus, and let him restore in us whatever is dead to life?
Preached at St Ignatius Church
photo: www.healthline.com (Internet)
Add a comment