In the Gospel last Sunday, the Lord Jesus revealed his divine glory by demonstrating his mastery over a storm on the Sea of Galilee, and today he does the same by showing his dominion over disease and death. But if Jesus Christ is Lord and if he truly has dominion over this universe and everything in it, then why do we continue, even after the Resurrection, to suffer from disaster, disease, and death? Why doesn’t the Savior simply put a stop to all that and allow us to begin living now the abundant life which he came to provide.
To answer those questions we must first understand how the world came to be as it is, and if God created all things, then along with the good things he made, it would seem that he also created bad things like disasters, disease, and death. But the truth is more complex than that. Listen to our first reading from the Book of Wisdom:
“God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being: and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is not a destructive drug among them, nor any domain of the netherworld on earth, for justice is undying. For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made man. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world.” (Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24)
These few verses of Wisdom summarize the accounts of our creation and Fall in the Book of Genesis, accounts which include the following truths: God alone is the Creator, and he freely created this universe as an expression of his divine glory. At the crown of creation, God placed man, men and women who are human persons created in his image and likeness and destined to be his children, just as he also created angelic persons, endowed with intellect and will, to be his servants. To both men and angels God gave the gift of freedom, and each created person, human and angelic alike, must choose whether or not to live in keeping with the eternal plan of the Creator.
At the beginning of creation, some angelic persons decided not to live in harmony with God, and one possible reason for their rebellion is that they realized their destiny did not include the grace of adoption by the Creator and a share in divine glory by a union with Christ as does ours, and so they fell from God’s grace in a futile effort to construe reality according to their own preferences.
But whatever the reason for the fall of some angels, at the center of this diabolical rebellion was the effort to ruin the human race by inducing our first parents to join their insurrection against the Creator, and then by the envy of the devil, death entered the world through Adam and Eve. Please note too that this is not, as unbelievers suppose, a flight of superstitious fancy; it is, rather, the truth of the origin of all things, both the visible and the invisible.
So, God did not make death; we did. Our Fall from grace, like that of the rebellious angels, was permitted by God because the condition of authentic freedom is the possibility of misusing that freedom. The only way God could prevent both angels and men from misusing our freedom is to deprive us of that freedom, and then we would be robots rather than persons. And so from the beginning, the eternal plan of salvation included a remedy for the misuse of our freedom, and that remedy is the incarnation of God the Son as the Son of Mary, the Son of Man.
Holy Scripture affirms that all evil in the world, both physical and moral, is in some way the result of the primordial rebellion of angels and men. The exact mechanism which directly connects the Fall from grace to disaster and disease and death is not precisely explained, but all disorder in the world is in some way derived from the fundamental disorder of sin - the deliberate rejection of God’s wisdom and love. And so Scripture reveals that our Fall from grace and the sins that flow from the Fall are the source of all of our suffering, including the pitiable state of being the slaves of our own passions rather than their masters.
Which takes us back to the mission and ministry of Christ the Lord. Even after his Resurrection, the Savior has not yet brought about the new heavens and the new earth in which there is no suffering or pain; that will come only at the Last Day. No, by the Paschal Mystery of his passion, death, and Resurrection, the Lord Jesus revealed the new life of grace to those who follow him in the Way of the Cross, a way of life that includes but transcends suffering of every kind. So disaster, disease, and death remain part of the human condition even after we have been made a new creation in the Risen Christ, as Saint Paul put it last week. What we have now are the hope and promise of eternal glory from the Word made flesh.
Yes, the Lord Jesus raised the dead daughter of the synagogue ruler Jairus, but this was not the new life of the Resurrection; it was merely a return to the old life of the fallen created world. And so that little girl had to die again, as did the son of the widow of Nain and Lazarus of Bethany, the two other people who were restored to life by the Lord Jesus. But in demonstrating his mastery over nature, disease, and death, Christ the Lord was teaching us to trust the truth of his words. And even more, he was teaching us that he himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
But if, even in Christ, our hope for a life free of suffering and death cannot be found in this world, that does not mean that we are now left without comfort. Notice that after the Lord Jesus restored the little girl to life, he instructed that she should be given something to eat. Because he took our human nature in order to give us a share in his divine nature, the Word made flesh understands our condition from the inside out, and no need of ours is too small to escape his loving attention.
That is what Saint Paul meant by writing to the Corinthians that though Christ was rich, he became poor for our sake, so that by his poverty we might become rich. This is the wonderful exchange of the divine and human natures in Christ, an exchange in which we become participants in divine life by the grace ordinarily given to us through the sacraments, above all in the Most Holy Eucharist.
During every Mass, as the chalice is prepared at the altar during the offertory rite, wine is first poured into the vessel and then a drop of water is added, accompanied by these words: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
The wine represents God’s divine nature, and the water stands for our human nature. Their commingling is such that after they are mixed together it is no longer possible to separate one from the other, and that is the supreme gift of the Lord Jesus to all who are born again by water and the Holy Spirit in Baptism and who persevere in living the life of the new creation by grace through faith, hope, and love, especially by receiving the sacraments of the new and everlasting covenant.
The sacramental economy of salvation means that God’s grace is mediated to us through created matter like bread and wine, oil and water, the touch of a human hand and the spoken word. And this essential truth is revealed in the Gospel today by the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage.
She had heard about Jesus, Saint Mark tells us, and so she sought him out, confident that if she could just touch his cloak, he would heal her. But who told her about Jesus? A friend perhaps or a relative or neighbor? Whoever it was, someone bore witness to this woman in pain that Jesus of Nazareth could save her, and so she went to him with confident humility, in the hope of just touching the hem of his garment.
Friends, like the one who directed this woman to Christ, we must bear witness to others that in the Holy Eucharist, we touch the Risen Lord Jesus and receive from him the medicine of immortality, the holy mystery of his Body and Blood by which we are nourished unto everlasting life. Those who approach Christ the Lord with the honest simplicity of the sick woman and synagogue official will always find what they seek, and through the Gospel we receive the grace to understand our lives and our suffering in the light God’s eternal plan of salvation revealed and consummated by the divine Redeemer and only Savior of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 30 June 2024, the 13th Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman
Truth and Wisdom, always God’s Saving Grace.