Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

The Jesus who took aside a deaf man with a speech impediment, opened his ears and released his tongue, this Jesus is a healer.  The episode is rich, not simply for what it did to one victim of brokenness, but more important for what it tells us about Jesus and about you and me.  Jesus loved to talk and listen to and eat and drink with the sick, the tax collectors, the poor, the homeless, the sinners, the Gentiles, the deaf and dumb.  He was far more comfortable with the village lunatics than the religious hypocrites.

The gospel of Mark is crowded with such stories.  There are people possessed: a man convulsed, a boy foaming and grinding his teeth, a little girl.  There is Simon Peter’s mother-in-law; a leper begging to be cleansed; a paralyzed man let down by his friends through the roof; a man with a withered hand; the dead daughter of a synagogue leader; a woman hemorrhaging for 12 years; a blind man imploring Jesus to touch him, and the blind Bartimaeus pleading for mercy.

The other evangelists are hardly different.  Matthew tells us Jesus “went throughout Galilee curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”  Luke not only tells of leprosy, paralysis, a withered hand, possession, a dead only son, blindness.  There is that striking scene in Luke where John the Baptist sends two disciples to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?  Jesus tells them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raise, the poor have good news brought to them.”

But why?  Why did Jesus heal?  On the face of it, often out of compassion.  Or to signal that God’s reign has come to earth in Jesus.  But there is something more profound.  Recall the very word “heal” has to do with wholeness.  At base, why Jesus healed was why Jesus took our flesh: to destroy the enmity, the hostility, the brokenness that sin had created.  In a word, the healing that Jesus had in mind was to restore communion with God, within each person, between sisters and brothers, and with the earth.  To make the Body of Christ whole.

Healing did not stop with Jesus’ death.  Within the Catholic body, healing is an ever-present must.  Why?  Because the church is human, is composed of sinners.  Because as long as selfishness and sin, hunger and hate, corruption and conflict, division and distance, distress and despair, disease and death roam our earth and infect our body, Christianity is not yet whole.

A final word: two questions.  1.  Where do I need healing, wholeness?  In my personal relationship with God?  A running battle with family?  In the way I use God’s good earth?  2.  Where am I playing Christ the healer?  It is my Christian vocation and yours.  Where does the healing Christ call you to heal?  Only you know – only you and the Christ within you, the Christ who calls you.  Calls you now.

Paul A. Magnano

Pastor