02.06.2021 Homily

When people are cured, they're returned physically to the way they were before the disease. But when people are healed, there is something much deeper that happens to them that transforms their inner life. Sometimes people say that their illness was really a great gift, that in that illness, they discovered more deeply what life was all about. I know a hospice minister who said, "I would pay a great deal of attention to the inner healing that I would hope might happen if I were diagnosed with cancer. I would give careful thought to the meaning of my life, and what I had to let go of, and what I wanted to hold on to." Some patients report a greater sense of being alive and of being in communion with others very deeply at the time of their illness.

Now in the gospel, the people are meant to interpret the cures that Jesus does as a response to human need. And this interpretation is meant to change their minds and their hearts, that in seeing the work of Jesus, something has to happen within them. The proper response to cures and healings of that kind is a change of mind and behavior. And just being bedazzled by the miracle is not sufficient.

Now, this short few verses about Peter's mother-in-law gives an indication that both the cure and the healing took place. She had a fever. She was in bed. They told Jesus about her. Jesus went to her, grasps her by the hand, and lifted her up. His touch became, if you will, a transfusion. His life flowed into hers. He loved the person who was at the center of the sickness. He lifted her up. And then we're told that immediately the fever left her, and she began to serve them. So God's service to her becomes the occasion of her service to others.

 

Healing really reconnects ourselves to the very depth of who we are. The whole gospel attests that service is the hallmark of the new humanity that Jesus comes to establish. He says, "The Son of Man comes not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as ransom for many."

The gospel path begins with cures, and these cures may actually lead to healing, and that those who witness this, are meant themselves to be transformed, that their lives are meant to be turned upside down, that they just aren't fans who stand and who marvel at the wonders of this miracle worker, but that those actions of Jesus were meant to in some way reinform their lives.

You see, that's why Jesus didn't want those people who were cured to go and tell anything about it, because he was afraid that people would see him just as the magician who cures people. And he wasn't really out about curing people. He was out about healing people. Remember in St. Luke's gospel, the story of the 10 lepers, and he sends all of them to the priest to offer sacrifice for their cure. And then we're told one of those 10 realized that he had been healed. All of them knew they were cured, but one of them realized that he had also been healed, that something had taken place within him that transformed his life. And that's what caused him to run back and to give thanks. And Jesus said, "What about the other nine? Weren't they cured as well?" And the answer is yes, they were, but they weren't open to being healed. They were satisfied with just being physically okay.

Well, I would suggest that what you and I have experienced over the past year in some ways is akin to an illness, that this pandemic and the effect that it has had upon our lives is a corporate kind of illness. And that would suggest that the vaccine is the cure. It's not the healing. The vaccine is what cures us, but the healing has to do with what's inside. What has occurred during the past year inside for me? What has this strange experience done to me? How am I different today because I have passed through that? How have I been healed? How has the pandemic been a gift to me?