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, upright Job went from powerful potentate to
pariah: he lost everything: family, possessions, health, happiness,
hope. “I shall not see happiness again,” he cried out in 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. I can picture that
synagogue because we visited it on our Holy Land pilgrimage last year,
and we visited Peter’s house, too. So, I can with some clarity see Jesus
leaving the synagogue and arriving at the home of Peter and Andrew where
he encountered yet more suffering: Peter’s mother-in-law 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 invariably did when he encountered a sick
person.
But, we might ask, what
about now? What about us? Where is Jesus when it comes to our illnesses,
our sufferings? 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 57 years I’ve been a
priest I can point to only a very few times when it seemed like a truly
remarkable, hard-to-explain physical healing took place. But I can point
to countless times when people were healed in ways even 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 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.
Father Henri Nouwen, the
popular 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. With God’s grace they will!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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