Going to Jesus with Faith

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  This passage of the raising of the Jairus’s daughter (in Matthew’s account he is only called a certain official), with the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage sandwiched in-between, is important enough that it is included in all three synoptic Gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).  And we have two things going on: one, the Lord goes to raise the daughter of Jairus (Luke and Mark put her at the point of death, but not dead yet); two, the Lord heals the woman with the hemorrhage, seemingly without even knowing it (at least in the other accounts).  But both of these accounts show important aspects of the life of a disciple: going to Christ and having faith.
    In both parts of today’s Gospel, the people go to the Savior for what they want.  The official goes so that his daughter might have life.  He pleads with Christ to heal her, but after she has died, to raise her from the dead.  The woman needs healing, and interrupts the Lord’s journey to Jairus’s house.  She does not feel comfortable speaking with Christ, but has confidence that all she has to do is touch His clothes and she will be healed.  In both cases, the people go to Christ for what they need, and He provides for them.
    In both parts of today’s Gospel, that approach to the Lord is motivated by faith.  Jairus has faith that the Lord will heal or raise his daughter.  The woman has faith that if she but touches the hem of Christ’s garment that she will receive the healing for which she has long been searching.  In all three Gospel accounts, this story is fairly early in the Lord’s public ministry, so this faith is based mostly on the hope for who this itinerant rabbi might be.
    The two temptations for us as followers of Christ are to fall into the error of a kind of fideism, which the philosopher Alvin Plantinga describes as “the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason”; or rationalism, where faith has no role in our lives, and we only follow scientific realities.  Now, both might seem like an extreme no one here would fall into, but they can sneak up quite quickly. 
    In the case of a brand of fideism, we go to God, which is good, but we don’t also utilize what God has revealed through human reason.  There are those who refuse to seek medical treatment because faith in God’s healing will suffice, and if God wants the person to be healed, that person will be healed.  When someone is sick, we should go to God to ask for the health of an individual.  We should have faith that God can do amazing things without any assistance from another, just like in the Gospel.  But we should also utilize that gifts that God has given, whether to us or to others, in utilizing the natural sciences to work God’s healing.  If a child’s arm is broken, we don’t just pray over that child, hoping that the bone will set itself correctly.  We pray for healing, and we take the child to a doctor to set the arm and put it in a cast.
    In the case of a type of rationalism, we ignore God altogether, and rely simply upon our wisdom.  While this might seem like something we would never do, especially as people who go to church, it can sneak in quite easily and clandestinely to our lives, such that, as we approach decisions, we fail to include God in those decisions at all.  We start out from the view that we know what is best, and ask God simply to affirm our decision, rather than putting our decision to him, and leaving space in our life for His will to be done.  We allow our reason to take the place of God’s providence, and leave no room for God to act.
    St. Paul says in today’s epistle that we should follow his example, and St. Paul was someone who both used reason and relied on faith in God.  He avoided the vicious extremes of fideism and rationalism, and took the virtuous middle road of rational faith, leaving room for God and also utilizing his own wisdom.  We see this in the trial St. Paul undergoes before he is sent to Rome for Caesar’s decision.

    St. Paul had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would go to Jerusalem to undergo imprisonment and hardships.  When, on his way to Jerusalem, he stopped in Caesarea, a prophet by the name of Agabus came to St. Paul, “too Paul’s belt, bound his own feet and hands with it, and said, ‘Thus says the holy Spirit: This is the way the Jews will bind the owner of this belt in Jerusalem, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles.’”  St. Paul was open to the will of God leading him back to Jerusalem.  But, when on trial before the high priest and Sanhedrin, Paul also realized that some were Pharisees, who believe in the resurrection, and some were Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection.  He used that knowledge to pit them against each other, saying that he was on trial for his belief in the resurrection of the dead, such that the Pharisees wanted to release him, but the Sadducees would not allow it.
    Towards the end of that trial, the Lord spoke to St. Paul and said, “‘Take courage.  For just as you have borne witness to my cause in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness in Rome.’”  St. Paul was transferred back to Caesarea to be questioned by the Roman governor Felix.  The case wouldn’t be decided, as Felix and his successor, Festus, wanted to curry favor from the Jews, no doubt to help keep peace.  When St. Paul saw that Festus wanted to send him back to Jerusalem, he invoked his right as a Roman citizen, and said, “‘I appeal to Caesar.’”  Festus keeps him a little longer and lets him speak to King Agrippa.  King Agrippa, after hearing Paul’s testimony and witness of his faith, admits that Paul had done nothing wrong, and told Festus, “‘This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar.’”  But St. Paul knew that God wanted him to witness to the faith in Rome, so he appealed to Caesar, rather than risk the chance of being set free again.  St. Paul trusted in God, believed what God had revealed to him, but also used his reason and wit to cooperate with the plan of God.
     Our challenge today is to follow the example of Jairus and of the woman with the hemorrhage and of St. Paul: to go to the Lord when we are in any need, and to have faith in His plan.  This doesn’t mean that we ignore God’s gift of reason to us, nor does it mean that we ignore God and only use our reason.  Rather, we take our desires and plans to God, and submit them to His Divine Providence, knowing that sometimes God will intervene in some way to change our plans to be more in accord with His, and that sometimes God will allow our plans to proceed as we desired.  But the key is that we have faith in God, and that we go to Him in any need: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Re-discovering the Joy of the Resurrection

 Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    There is nothing so jarring to human existence as death.  Whether it’s the suddenness or the finality of it, death simply seems wrong.  It feels so wrong when it’s a young person, when a parent has to bury a child.  But even with a person who lived a long life, and who went through a prolonged illness, death still hurts and seems like it doesn’t belong.  And it doesn’t.
    Our first reading reminds us that “God did not make death.”  That hearkens back to Genesis, where God, the source of life, breathes His life into Adam and Eve.  But then, after they rebel against God and are banished from the Garden, God puts a limit on mortal life.  In one sense, this was a mercy, as God did not want us to live forever in a fallen state, always subject to the reign of sin.
    But then in our Gospel, we hear a kind of undoing of death in two ways: in an older woman, and in a younger child.  You may have missed the part about the older woman, but she had been suffering "with hemorrhages for twelve years.”  I’m no doctor, but a hemorrhage is a flow of blood.  Blood, to the Jews, was life, so if she was “leaking” blood, she was, in a sense, dying; the life was flowing out of her.  So both were, at least in one sense, dying.  And Jesus brings them both back to life.
    The Resurrection of Jesus is part of the good news that is at the heart of being Catholic.  And it’s good news because death is not, despite our experience, final.  It is the answer to a question that sits on every human heart.  Every human experiences death, and senses the wrongness of it.  As we sit in the funeral home with the casket in front of us, greeting family and friends, crying at the loss, laughing at favorite memories, we know it’s not supposed to be that way.  Jesus helps us to know that it no longer is that way, because He rose from the dead.
    Jesus’ Resurrection wasn’t like the new life that He gave to the woman with hemorrhages, or the daughter of Jairus, or the son of the widow of Nain, or even Lazarus.  They still died again.  But Jesus will not die again; His death was once for all.  Death was the poverty that Jesus took upon Himself, because Jesus is Life.  It’s like light becoming darkness, or gold becoming clay.  But Jesus did so because He knew that darkness cannot conquer light, and He wanted to make us who were clay into gold.  St. Augustine talks about this as the admirabile commercium, the wonderful exchange.  We gave Jesus death, which He willingly took upon Himself, and He gave us life.  
    So how do we get this deal?  How do we participate in this exchange?  Baptism begins this, as we die with Jesus in the waters of baptism, and rise to a new life of grace.  But it’s more than baptism.  Baptism is only the beginning.  What is meant to follow is a day-by-day deepening in our friendship with Jesus, and giving Him our death, and receiving His life.  
    The woman with the hemorrhages and Jairus, the father of the young girl, are beautiful examples of this exchange.  They have faith in Jesus, and so they go to Him.  Jairus goes to find Jesus, and the woman approaches Jesus as He walks in the crowd.  How often do we truly seek after Jesus, rather than fatalistically figuring that what is going to happen will happen?  How often do we take our death to Jesus to receive life?  It’s as simple as asking.
    But we also have to be willing to receive.  The life that Jesus wants for us is not the life we gave to Him.  We give Jesus a fallen life, a life of sin and death, and He wants to give us life.  But in order to receive life, we have to give up sin and death.  We have to do our best to put behind us those things that we want to do because of the fall, because of our concupiscence, our desire to do evil and avoid good, rather than doing good and avoiding evil.  Too often, we want to give Jesus our death, but we’d like to hang on to it a little, because, while deadly, it’s also familiar, and sometimes even a bit of fun.  But if we hang on to death, we cannot have life.  It’s not so much a punishment, as simply the way things work in the spiritual realm.  If our hands are still clenching onto what we have, they are not open to receive what Jesus wants to give.
   

As Catholics, we need to reclaim our faith in the Resurrection.  We need to reclaim our faith that death is not final, as troubling as it is.  Death is meant to be the last thing that we give Jesus, our last bit of life, so that He can give us His life.  Start engaging in the great exchange today.  Be in the habit of giving Jesus your all, especially your sin and daily deaths, so that He can give you His life.  Come to Jesus, and live.

Death and Resurrection

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Death.  It’s scary.  It seems so final.  What is beyond death is, generally, unknown.  It is the biggest change a person goes through in life, after being conceived and born.  We do everything we can to avoid death: we create new medicines; we buy creams to try to keep us looking young; we spend lots of money to fight death.  And yet, death comes to us all, some as young people, some as old.

Fighting death is, in one sense, natural for us because we were not made for death.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve cared for the Tree of Life, which would have allowed them to live forever.  But they were cast out of the garden, and banned from that tree.  And, as our first reading stated, “God did not make death.”  Death entered the world because when our first parents rejected God, they rejected life.  St. Paul says it this way in the Letter to the Romans: “Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned…”  Everything in our being knows that we are made for eternal life, and yet we all have to experience death, and so we fight against it.

But, we need no longer fear death, because Jesus has conquered it by His Death and Resurrection.  Jesus gave a foretaste of that in today’s Gospel.  The woman with hemorrhages was getting worse; perhaps she was close to death.  But she went to Jesus because she had faith that He could make things better.  The little girl, the synagogue official’s daughter, was already dead by the time that Jesus got to her.  But her parents had faith, and she was returned to them.  Jesus unbound the power of death and gave new life.  Now, in both cases, the woman and the girl, they would later die.  But their faith changed the approach to death.  They followed Jesus’ command that we heard, “‘Do not be afraid; just have faith.’”

Death, for those who have faith in and follow Jesus should not be something that we fear so much.  Yes, we still may be anxious about the unknown, and we should not do anything to speed up our own death, but we need not be afraid if we have faith.  

In “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” a story is told about the Deathly Hallows and three brothers.  Two of the three brothers try to cheat death.  But the third brother gained Death’s cloak of invisibility, and hid from death for many years.  After a long life, the third brother gave his cloak of invisibility to his son, and, as the story goes, “greeted death as an old friend.”  That’s not quite our view of death as Christians, but there is something that rings true in that story.  As believers in Jesus, death is not something we fear, but something that we can greet as a friend, because it is the necessary transition from this life to the life to come.  St. Augustine says that the only Christian who should fear death, is the one who has not truly followed Jesus, because eternal life will not be a life of joy, but a life of eternal torment.

If we are not afraid, if we have faith in Jesus, death is that which is the conclusion of our trials and testing on earth, and the beginning of our reward.  The student who has studied is not afraid of the final exam, but sees it as the necessary way to move towards graduation.  Our final judgment is not based on what we know, but, as St. John of the Cross states, whom we loved and how we loved.  But it still can allow us to graduate, to move on, to pass over, from this Valley of Tears to the eternal banquet of the Lamb of God in heaven.  

But death need not only be thought of in terms of our final breath.  We experience little deaths throughout our life, and our approach to those little deaths should be no less occasions of faith in what Jesus can do.  There’s the little deaths that happen in our family life: when we realize that our little baby is no longer a baby and is becoming more independent; when we lose a job; when, despite years of Catholic education and formation in the home, a child breaks our heart and stops practicing the faith.  There’s also little deaths that happen in our faith life: when we lose a pastor that we love; up 75 a bit and then down 475, St. Mary in Mt. Morris announced last Tuesday that, effective immediately, the school is closed; in our own parish as we make the transition to two weekend Masses from three.  All of those and more are little deaths in our lives.  We can fear it, we can fight it, we can kick and scream about it, or we can be not afraid and have faith in Jesus, trusting that He who brought us to all those situations and more will carry us through it.

Because our faith and our hope is in what is beyond the death, and that’s new life.  When Jesus rose from the dead He blazed a trail for us so that where He has gone, we hope to follow.  And although we have never seen what is on the other side of our own death, we have seen what is on the other side of Jesus’ death, and that is new life, transfigured life, glorified life.  To gain that new, transfigured, and glorified life, we need only follow Jesus and His way.  As we face death, in its many forms, Jesus invites us today: “‘Do not be afraid; just have faith.’”

Frequent Dying and Rising

Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

For as stupendous as raising someone from the dead is, it happens somewhat frequently in the Bible.  We heard about God raising the widow of Zarephath’s child through Elijah in our first reading, and Jesus raising the son of the widow from Nain in today’s Gospel.  Jesus also raises the daughter of Jairus, a synagogue official, and Lazarus.  After Jesus ascended into heaven, Peter raises a young girl named Dorkas (what an unfortunate name!), and Paul raises to life a person who falls out of a window after that person had fallen asleep because of how long Paul was preaching (there are dangers with preaching too long!).  I don’t know why, but I feel like that’s a lot of times.  About a month ago, I was given credit for raising someone from the dead by some of our firefighters, after I was riding with the firefighters and we responded to a call of someone having a heart attack, who seemed to miraculously wake up when we arrived (in reality, that person was an example of why you should never mix alcohol and a prescription narcotic).

But God truly does raise people from death on a regular basis, if we take time to think about it.  God raises from death those who are baptized.  In baptism, children, men and women are taken from being at enmity with God to being His children.  By baptism, people are buried with Christ–they die–so that they can rise with Him to new life.  By baptism, the old self has to die, like the grain of wheat, so that the new self, the person alive in Christ, can live.  

But that process of dying and rising does not stop on the day that we are baptized.  Each day we have the opportunity to die and rise.  It starts for some of us at the moment our eyes open.  At that moment we have the opportunity to die to our laziness and the comfort of our bed and rise to the new day that is before us.  There’s nothing wrong with hitting the snooze button if we have time, but at some point for many of us, we need to get up and get prepared for the day.  That’s why, at the beginning of my day, before my feet hit the floor of my bedroom, I say a short prayer: Mater mea, fiducia mea!–My Mother, my confidence!, and I entrust my entire day to Jesus through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  You could say any prayer that you like, but prayer is a great way to rise to new life.

Throughout our day there will be people trying to kill us.  Sometimes we are the people trying to kill others.  Hopefully not literally, but certainly figuratively.  What I mean by that is that we are all sinful, and we all give in to temptations, to not be disciples of Jesus.  Whether it’s others or ourselves, there’s gossip, slander, sharing secrets we have no business sharing, treating others as objects or as means to advancement, and the list could go on and on.  If we are the culprit, then we need to die to all of those sins.  We need them to be put to death, and Jesus does that by His suffering on the cross.  When we bite our lip, or treat someone kindly, we are dying to our fallen nature and its sinful tendencies.  If we are on the receiving end, then we die when we patiently suffer through them (correcting when necessary and prudent) instead of giving back what we received.  And whether we are putting to death our own tendencies, or suffering with Jesus because of others’ tendencies, new life, resurrection, is available for us, not only after our earthly life ends, but even on this side of eternity.

Because those who can accept suffering and unite it with Jesus do live happier lives.  They may still have the same sorrows, but they do not let the sorrows control their lives.  They cling to their new life in Christ, given to them in baptism, and live in the joy of the Resurrection, even in this vale of tears.  Which is the happier life: the one tossed about by uncontrollable forces, or the one who entrusts his or her life to God and stays on a steady course toward Him?

Everything in our nature rebels against death.  We were not made to die, but experience death because of sin.  We see that rejection of death and its power in our first reading and Gospel today.  But there is another kind of death, a healing death, a death to our sinful selves, a death in Christ, which is not contrary to who we are, but helps us to be the fullest person we were created to be.  May we allow our sinful natures to die with Christ on the cross, so that we can also rise with Him to new life, both in our daily lives, and especially in the life to come.