A homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7a, Jas 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37
My father, a family physician who practiced quirky but scientifically sound medicine for more than 50 years, was his own worst patient.
His family members came in second, but we’ll get to that later.
This physician not only could not heal himself, he did not even try, as far as my brothers and sisters-in-law and I could ever determine.
Here’s how this played out, and thank you for traveling along with me:
Several Epiphany Sundays ago, while I was helping volunteers put away the Christmas decorations at church, Dad fell out of bed and insisted he landed on his penny loafers, bruising his ribs.
The orthopedist at Riverview Medical Center found nothing wrong with his ribs, to which Dad, in his slight dementia, replied, “Of course not. My stomach hurts.”
The gastro who then checked him found nothing. By then, Dad was back to complaining about his ribs. A PET scan revealed the true diagnosis of cancer.
The doctor-now-patient was dead within a month, surrounded by loving family members he’d kept in the dark for God only knows how long. We also wondered if the secret likewise was kept by a physician friend he’d sworn to secrecy.
Was this a generational thing, to avoid asking for help from doctors (even though he was one)? Was this a generational thing, to deny The Big C? Was this a generational thing, not to burden the family with worry or to burden himself with fawning and hovering people who’d ask him how he was doing every 12 minutes?
Dunno.
I do know that since humankind’s earliest encounters with God Who Is Love, and especially amplified and clarified through the healing ministry of Jesus, Emmanuel, God With Us, divine healing was been freely and abundantly available to all who seek it.
But a mature relationship with our Triune God does require us to ask, to reach out, to actively and intentionally seek that divine healing.
We routinely preach and discuss how God’s arms are wide open, waiting to embrace us. How God calls us to relationship, to service, to community. God meets us halfway, even 99% of the way, but God does not lasso us. We are not Chincoteague wild horses; God has no intention of breaking us to bridle and bit.
We, using our free will, must choose to go at least part of the way to complete the relationship.
If we need a metaphor, we have the image of God as the rock to cling to or the safe harbor to sail into. But we must cling. We must sail.
We must ask for healing. Which is why we have prayers and sacraments that enable us to do just that.
Although Mark’s Gospel today doesn’t explicitly state that people asked Jesus for this healing, other Scripture passages do. Plenty of them.
In the days he walked on the Earth, Jesus healed their bodies. Jesus healed their souls.
In the days ever since then, Jesus has continued to heal our bodies. Jesus continues to heal our souls.
The vast majority of healing we receive physically comes through the miracle of modern medicine, which came about through the God-given scientific talents of millions of researchers over hundreds of years. And healing takes hold in us through our faith in that medicine, vaccine skeptics notwithstanding.
Yes, the physical, biological and mathematical sciences are gifts from God. So are the social sciences that include psychological and emotional healing for those struggling under the weight of daily life in a complex and divided world.
All of those gifts are wrapped in the spiritual healing and nourishment God gives us through the Word and the Eucharist. They are not separate from our lives. We are human, and to be human means to be body, mind and spirit all the time, all at once.
To be human means suffering, from time to time. God forbid our sufferings should be Sisyphean. Yet, even if that seems true, we have God’s promise to help us up anytime we stumble.
God sets no limit on how many times we may ask for healing, nor on how often. God’s answer is always yes.
And, in what I believe to be a bit of reverse psychology,
[Jesus] ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.
we likewise should proclaim to the rooftops the ways Divine Love has transformed us through the power of healing.
P.S.
When your father was a doctor, you never got to be Ferris Bueller. Only a fever high enough to induce convulsions, a rash that could put flocked wallpaper to shame or compound fractures in multiple extremities warranted a day off from school.
Take two aspirins and hang over the side of your bed to let your sinuses drain. Gargle with Pepsi. Get up; the bus’ll be here in 10 minutes.
So I toughed it out … until I was in class, and knew the school nurse had a kind heart.
I never achieved a perfect attendance record, but I came close, because I knew how to go home early after I was counted as present for the day. (I wish I knew key dates in history as well as I knew that scam.)
