JANUARY 22, 2017
SUNDAY 3:00 PM EXTRAORDINARY FORM MASS
For those who watched the recent Inauguration, it was refreshing to see six religious leaders offer prayers and readings from Scripture, five of whom represented Christian Churches or ecclesial communities, and four of whom proclaimed the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
In today's Gospel, we see Christ healing a leper as well as the servant of a Roman official.
The leper was a social outcast. For a leper to approach someone was illegal. Yet Jesus doesn't remind him of the law. For someone to touch a leper made that person unclean. Yet Jesus touches the leper.
Our Lord solves the latter problem by making the leper clean through a miraculous healing. The wrong is righted, not by banishing Jesus to a leper colony for a trial period, but by cleansing the leper of what was then an incurable and eventually terminal illness.
Jesus shows us that God knows no boundaries, nor does God respect our boundaries.
The second healing is done for a Roman official. Again, not someone in favor with the local Jewish authorities. The Romans were the hegemonistic occupying pagan force. Foreign invaders who worshipped false gods. Aliens who desecrated the land by their mere presence, whose armies kept the people at bay, and whose violence was feared.
Yet Jesus does not hesitate to offer to go and heal the man's servant.
He doesn't lecture him on freedom, or local rule. He doesn't demand a withdrawal of forces. Nor does he lecture him on slavery, for this servant was most certainly a slave and not a hired hand.
Jesus is not ashamed of our problems. His mission is to save, to heal, to redeem the individual.
Even with this, the Roman official, perhaps sensitive to the purity law of the Jews, prefers that Jesus not enter his home lest He incur ritual impurity. Here, the foreigner has more faith and respect for the Law than many of those in Israel.
Jesus recognizes his faith, and praises him for it. And in a show of authority for a man of authority, Jesus gives the word to heal the servant.
God knows no boundaries. God is not ashamed of our issues.
God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to save us from our sins. Despite the walls we build, the prejudices we hold, the lines we draw in the sand. God reaches through these, and saves us ... heals us ... redeems us ... from our sins and from the effects of sin in the world.
What is needed from us is the humble word of Faith ... recognizing that God is God and we are not ... not a strident demand ... not a closeted denial of our issues ... but an open, honest recognition of what separates us from God, and the desire for redemption and healing.
As we approach this altar to receive the Sacred Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, let us pray to never be ashamed of Christ – for He is not ashamed of us. He died on the cross for us, for our sins, and for our issues. Not to approve of sin, but to raise us above it. As we receive the Eucharist today, may we reach through our boundaries and touch Christ. May the manifold graces of this sacrament today heal us ... save us ... and redeem us. Not by our power, but through Christ and by the will of God the Father, and the Power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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