Today’s first reading gives us a little window
onto Job whose name is a synonym for suffering, and whose story is a
textbook study on the Problem of Evil. In a flash, the pious and upright
Job went from being powerful potentate to pariah: he lost everything:
family, possessions, health, happiness, hope. “I shall not see happiness
again,” he cried out from his dark misery.
But while Job may have lost hope, he never lost
faith, although he came close. And God came close to him. In
the midst of his misery God came close to him, clothed in splendor,
wrapped in mystery, never justifying his actions to Job, and never
really solving the riddle of his suffering, but in the end, healing him,
restoring his prosperity, giving him length of days. So Job’s lament was
not the last word. God had the last word. God always does.
In today’s reading from Mark’s gospel, it’s
Jesus who has the last word in the face of human suffering. The story
begins with Jesus leaving the synagogue after exorcising a demon from a
poor, unfortunate fellow. Jesus then arrives at the home of Peter and
Andrew where he encounters more suffering: Peter’s mother-in-law is in
bed with a fever. He gently takes her by the hand and helps her
up, and immediately she is well enough to wait on everyone.
But that’s only the beginning. As evening
comes on, a large group of people arrives at the house where Jesus is.
The whole town gathers at the door, Mark tells us. True to form,
Jesus takes time to heal each person no matter what the malady. That’s
what Jesus always did whenever he encountered faith in a sick person.
But, we might ask, what about now? What
about us? Where is Jesus when it comes to our illnesses, our
sufferings? Where is Jesus during this time of pandemic? Is faith in
Jesus all we need in order to be healed? We would be foolish to maintain
that, wouldn’t we? There’s too much evidence to the contrary – unless,
of course, we’re willing to take a deeper look at the meaning of
healing. In the nearly 55 years I’ve been a priest I can point
maybe to a few times when it seemed like a truly remarkable,
unexplainable – maybe even miraculous - physical healing took place. But
I can point to countless times when people were healed in ways deeper
even than physical: healed in their hearts, healed in their
emotions, healed in the deepest part of their souls. And in each case,
they came to view their physical suffering with new eyes as they began
to know Jesus in new ways. Experiences like those have made me realize
that healing has more than one meaning, and that Jesus actually heals in
more than one way. He does.
And that’s not all. Healing not only has more
than one meaning, healing is seldom a one-way street. Healers often need
healing themselves. I think that’s even true of Jesus. Does that sound
strange to you - that Jesus could need healing? Strange as that may
seem, I think it’s true.
Look at Jesus in that gospel passage. He
is beleaguered – pressed at from every side by sick and needy and
disturbed people, people hungry for one thing only: their own healing.
But Jesus has needs of his own. He has a need for quiet, for
prayer, for the refreshment of his own spirit – so much so that he
quietly steals away to a deserted place in the early hours of morning,
taking for himself the only hours that people haven’t taken from him.
Is the healer seeking healing for his own
burdened spirit? I think so. Jesus longs for time alone with
his Father, time when his Father’s voice can anoint him, strengthen him,
heal him so he can continue to offer healing to others. Healing, it
seems, not only has more than one meaning; healing is also a two-way
street.
St. Paul gives further insight into healing in
today’s reading from First Corinthians. When he writes that he has
“become one with the weak to win over the weak,” Paul seems to be
reaching deep inside himself, coming to terms with his own wounds and
his own weaknesses so that those very wounds and weaknesses of his can
be part of the gifts he brings to his ministry.
Henri Nouwen, the popular late twentieth
century spiritual writer, wrote a whole book about this – a very popular
book, “The Wounded Healer” - coining a now consecrated phrase and making
the important point that the only healers truly capable of bringing
healing to others are the wounded healers - the ones who honestly and
humbly come to terms with their own shadows, their own broken hearts,
their own broken promises.
But none of this can be true of Jesus, the
sinless One who had no shadows and broke no promises, can it?
Maybe it can, because even though Jesus was sinless, he did, as St. Paul
put it so graphically, “become sin for us.” He did. And in so
doing, his own broken body and his lonely, shattered spirit became the
path by which others would find healing. The path by which we
would find healing. I see Jesus as the first Wounded Healer.
My friends, it is his body broken for us that
we now receive in the Eucharist for our healing, and it is our own
broken bodies – and our broken spirits, too - that in God’s mysterious
providence, can become instruments of healing for others. They can. May
it be so!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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