June 9, 2013 – 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time “I will praise you, Lord for you have rescued me.” These words are taken from Psalm 30 in the Holy Bible. What does it mean to be rescued? Well, our readings are very specific. In our first reading from the First Book of Kings, Elijah prays over a widow’s son, the boy is restored to life and Elijah is proclaimed as a prophet. In our reading from the Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul tells the story of his own miraculous conversion. He omits several dramatic parts of St. Luke’s version of the same story in the Acts of the Apostles. He does not mention the death of St. Stephen, Paul’s temporary blindness, or Paul’s being baptized into the Christian community. St. Paul stresses that God revealed Jesus to him, and God gave him a mission to convert the Gentiles. He tells of three years of solitary prayer in the desert. But he omits the ten year gap between his Baptism and his being ordained an Apostle by the Church in Antioch. Instead he stresses his individual experience of conversion and mission. Our reading from the Gospel of Luke is quite similar to the story of Elijah. Jesus comes to a city just as a widow with a large crowd is walking to the cemetery to bury her son, her only child. Jesus commands the boy to rise. When he does, the whole crowd proclaims throughout Judea and the surrounding territory that Jesus is a prophet. People are quite divided over the topic of miracles. Some people are very credulous, that is prone to see miracles everywhere. When I lived in Ohio for awhile it was nearly impossible to drive down Highway 20 because of the many cars and trucks of people who claimed to see the image of Jesus in a rust stain on an old water tower. By way of contrast Thomas Jefferson was U. S. Ambassador to France and President of the United States. He doubled the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. He founded the University of Virginia and was a prolific inventor and architect. But he edited his own version of the Bible minus all the miracles. Mark Twain disposed of miracles as he did of all things he disapproved of with a humorous story. In the novel Huckleberry Finn, the central character is delightfully uncivilized. He is taken in by the Widow Douglas who tries to make a Christian of the gleeful little savage. Huck is fascinated by the Widow’s instruction on prayer. He decides to test the idea of miracles by praying on several nights for fish hooks. When they do not appear in the morning, he sees this as scientific proof that faith, prayer and miracles are just one more Christian lie. But one part of the teaching of Jesus on prayer is that God always answers our prayers. Sometimes he says, “No.” We are told that Jesus made the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk and the dead to rise. What we sometimes don’t immediately notice is that Jesus does not heal all the blind, deaf and lame. Nor does he empty all the cemeteries. On the contrary Jesus instructs most of us to carry the cross we have been given just as he did. In 1953, 20th Century Fox released a motion picture entitled The Robe. It was based on a novel written by Lloyd C. Douglas, a Lutheran minister from Akron, Ohio. Richard Burton plays Marcellus, the Roman soldier in charge of the crucifixion of Jesus. At the foot of the cross the soldiers throw dice to see who will get Jesus’ robe. Marcellus wins the robe and gives it to his slave Demetrius. Demetrius runs away and Marcellus returns to Rome. But he has become obsessed with the Robe and the man who wore it. He returns to Palestine to try and find the robe. He traces down a small persecuted Christian community; but he grows angry at the stories of Jesus’ miracles. One day he meets a severely handicapped young Christian woman. He persuades her to talk about Jesus. She describes how she became handicapped and how bitter she had become. When Jesus came to her village she asked him to heal her. Marcellus interrupts her story with the cruel remark: “And he could not do it.” She looks sympathetically at Marcellus. “Oh, he could,” she said, “He did.” “But you can’t walk,” says Marcellus. “He healed my heart,” she says. “He healed my soul. I know I will never walk again; but I have accepted my handicap. And he loosened my tongue so that I can sing. I was always too afraid and embarrassed to sing before.” God bless all doctors who make it possible for the blind to see, the deaf to hear, to lame to walk. Those are marvelous accomplishments. And we should pray every day for those called to the ministry of health care. But a miracle is something else. St. John in his Gopel never uses the word “miracle.” Instead he uses the word “sign.” The word “miracle” emphasizes that the action is a suspension of the natural laws that bind the universe. The word “sign” emphasizes that God is with us with his saving power even in our darkest moments. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits was wounded in his leg at the Battle of Pamplona. He limped for the rest of his life. But during his long recuperation he discovered his vocation as a priest and missionary. Only when he was weak and vulnerable and unable to help himself did he discover that the metal was ready for the maker’s hand. God transformed a hollow braggart, a boastful illiterate soldier into the founder of hundreds of Christian schools. St. Francis Xavier was a school companion of St. Ignatius. Along with being an excellent student, he was a superb athlete. In college he tutored Ignatius, who was no student by nature. Ignatius taught Francis the spiritual truths he learned as an invalid. Xavier was sent among the first missionaries to India and Japan. Xavier is one of the two great patron saints of missionaries. The other is St. Theresa the little flower. She never left her cloistered convent. She suffered terrible from an overly sensitive nature. But she saw all the difficulties she suffered because of the insensitivity of others and her own overly delicate personality as part of the cross. She offered them up for the redemption of souls. The doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ teaches us that we are all bound together by the Holy Spirit into the Body that makes up the church, a temple crafted out of living stones. What benefits one of us benefits all of us. What hurts one of us hurts all of us. We are the Body of Christ. The greatest miracles are the healing of our minds, hearts and souls.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:44:21 +0000