Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Catholicism is a sense-experience religion. When you come to Mass you can see beauty, especially in this church. You hear different prayers throughout the Mass. You smell the incense burning in the thurible. You taste the Eucharist on your tongue. You sit, stand, and kneel at different parts of the Mass. Ours is not a quietist religion where you simply sit and think of God. Worship of God and the practice of the faith in our day-to-day life involves the entire person, body and soul.
It’s important to see that our Lord comes to heal. One of the early Greek titles of our Lord was 𝛴𝜔𝜏𝜂𝜌, which means “savior,” but also has a context of healing. We tend to think of salvation in merely spiritual terms, saving our souls, but Christ knows that we are a union of soul and body, and so healing one has an impact on the other. How many people in the Gospels came to Christ with a physical malady, but ended up healed in body and soul, with their sins forgiven as well as their illness healed?
That ministry of healing did not end when our Lord ascended into heaven. He continues to heal us. Again, we tend to think of the healing that our souls need, but sometimes our bodies need healing, and the Lord does that as well. One of my classmates, Fr. Mathias Thelen, has a charism of healing, which, as he always says, is God healing through him. There are a great number of people whom God has cured, healed of infirmities, or eased the pain. We also require these types of miracles through the intercession of one who has a cause of sainthood. And those stories not only involve healing the body of that person, but also bolster our faith in how God works in our everyday world.
But it’s good not to put God in a box, and put limits on how He can heal us. At least from time to time, God heals us in an unexpected way, or maybe even a way with which we’re not that comfortable. Again, think about the man in the Gospel. Imagine yourself being taken aside by our Lord, and you have a confidence that He is going to heal you. You’re looking forward to being able to hear and speak. You will not longer be stuck mostly in your head. And then you see Jesus take his fingers, and put them into your ears. Okay…a little awkward, but maybe some touching of the ears was expected to cure the deafness. But then, He spits and touches your tongue! Now we’ve gone into the realm of the unexpected. I can’t remember a time where I let someone touch my tongue, though, granted, I’m not mute. Still, I think it’s at least plausible that this healing was not in the manner that the man expected. But the man was healed, and was so grateful that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut (it had been, after all, shut for so long before that!).
How is the Lord trying to heal you? Sometimes it can come in unexpected ways. Maybe we’re not having people put fingers in ears, spitting, and touching our tongues. But are we open to how God wants to heal and save us? Our eternal salvation was won in a very unexpected way: by the death of our Lord on the cross. It was so unexpected, almost none of His followers bothered to be with Him in His last hours. And the disciples are doubly astounded when He shows up alive, after they knew He had been crucified.
But our healing that comes to us in our everyday life from God can also be unexpected. Some couples take a little while to find their spouse, and it can often come after serious heartbreak. But that heartbreak with the wrong person sometimes leads to the right person, the spouse God wants for you. To use sports as an analogy, sometimes you have to go through serious pain to become a better athlete. Sometimes a parent needs to discipline a child, perhaps even with a spanking, to help the child understand what not to do (which will help the child be a better person and disciple). Sometimes a friend needs to speak a harsh word, or take drastic actions, in order to truly help the friend move on from a bad habit.
Those are all negative, but healing can happen in positive unexpected ways, too. No matter how we experience the unexpected, it can often be in those ways that our Lord heals us and helps us to grow. God continued to help His Church grow through St. Paul, who had previously persecuted the Church of God, hence St. Paul’s acknowledgement that he is the least of the Apostles. But God’s grace, which took a persecutor and turned him into a martyr, did the work; it was not in vain.
Do not be afraid to ask for healing from God. Have faith that God can heal whatever ails you, whether it’s physical or spiritual malady. Healing may not come how you expect it, or maybe not even when you expect it, but it will come, as a gift of God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
