Reflection on Mass readings for June 30 (13th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24
Psalm 30:2, 4, 5-6, 11, 12, 13
2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15
Mark 5:21-43 or 5:21-24, 35b-43
The first line from the reading from the Book of Wisdom should be shouted out today. “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”
It should be shouted out with conviction by Christians because the world is tempted to believe the opposite. God is the creator of all things. Death is the opposite of that statement of faith because death is the absence of life. True death is the absence of God.
Again, the Book of Wisdom proclaims that God formed man to be imperishable because God created us in the image of God’s nature, which is eternal. Yet we all know death entered the world through the denial of the good of God and through the envy of the devil.
But God is not stymied by our sin nor by the devil’s envy. He created the world in such a way that it is made for healing. He made us human beings for healing. To drive home the point, the Gospel shows us that Jesus is the healer who will not let sickness, or sin, or death have the last word.
The woman suffering from the flow of blood for twelve years was left isolated and unable to pray with God’s people because she was considered ritually impure. She was desperate for healing and reached out to Jesus to be healed with a desperate hope. She was healed because God made us for healing.
Jairus was beside himself with worry for his daughter, who was dying. His daughter’s condition was considered hopeless and those in the house thought hope had failed because, to all outward appearances, she had died.
Jesus wanted Jairus and his disciples to see that hope and healing are never lost because he made us for healing. And so, Jesus heals by calling out “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”
We may bear illness and suffer loss at the death of our loved ones and wonder, if we are made for healing, where is my healing right now? It may look like healing and hope are lost in our case.
Jesus came to heal the world and that healing is being worked out even now. He made the world and us for life, and Jesus is not blocked or even delayed in his healing by the nothingness that is sin and death. But he is asking us to live in the confidence that his healing is ours. Jesus is asking us to share the faith of the afflicted woman and the father of this little girl.
That healing is not just for us individually pointing to our eternal future. It is a healing that Jesus promises to the Church and to the whole world. We can look at the wounds of the Church in this world, sometimes caused by persecution from its enemies, and sometimes by the sins of its own members, undermining the credibility of the Church.
We can feel that healing for the Church almost seems impossible or too far off. The damage is too deep. But just as the suffering body of Jesus was transformed in the resurrection from the dead, so, too, the Church is made to be healed by the one who is the true healer of the world. Each of us should ache for that healing with the faith of the woman and Jairus.
Our world, how we live with each other in peace, may seem by us and others to be breaking down utterly. Cry out today the words of wisdom with confidence because the one who made the world as good, the one who made us for life, will bring the world to full healing in the new heaven and the new earth of his kingdom.
Msgr. Timothy Keeney is pastor at Church of the Incarnation, Charlottesville, and Our Lady of the Rosary, Crozet.