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In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Time and again we hear in the Gospel the story of men or women who were
healed of their illnesses. And it seems so simple in the Gospel: there
is a need, and God meets it. Why isn’t then — we ask ourselves — that it
does not happen to each of us? Each of us is in need of physical healing
and of the healing of our soul. And yet, only a few are healed. Why?
What we miss in the reading of the Gospel is that Christ did not heal
people indiscriminately. One person in a crowd was healed; many who were
also sick in body or soul, were not. And that comes from the fact that
in order to receive the grace of God, so that it acts in us unto the
healing of soul, or body, or both, we must be open to God, not to the
healing: to God...
Illness is something which we so often wish to banish from our
experience not only because it hampers our live, not only because it is
accompanied by pain, but also — I suspect even more — because it reminds
us of our frailty; it speaks to us and says, ‘Beware! You are mortal.
Your body at this moment speaks to you and says, You have no power to
restore me to health; you can do nothing; I may die out on you; I may
decay, and it will be the end of you earthly life...’ Isn’t it the main
reason why we fight for health, we pray for health? And yet, if that is
the way in which we ask God to heal us, to restore us to wholeness, we
are only asking to be allowed to forget that we are mortal instead of
being reminded, indeed quickened by this thought, realising that days
pass, that time goes short, and that we must, if we want to attain to
the full stature to which we are called on earth, we must make haste to
shake off all that within us is a power of death. Because illness and
death are not only conditioned by exterior reasons; there are within us
resentments, bitterness, hatred, greed — so many other things which kill
in us the quickness of the spirit and prevent us from living now,
already now, eternal life; that eternal life which is just life
in a true sense of the word, life in its fullness...
What can we do then? We must ask ourselves attentive questions; and we
come to God asking to heal us, we must first prepare ourselves to be
healed. And to be healed means not only to be made whole in view of
going back to the kind of life which we had before; it means to be whole
in order to start a new life, as though we had become aware that we had
died in the healing act of God; that all that was the old man in
us, this body of corruption of which Paul speaks, the old man which must
go in order for the new man to live, we must be prepared to become that
new man through the death of the past in order to start anew: like
Lazarus that was called out of the grave not to go back simply to what
had been his life before, but having experienced something which is
beyond uttering, to re-enter life on new terms. And for us these terms
are Christ, as Paul puts it: For me to live — is Christ and to die is
gain…
Are we capable of receiving healing? Are we willing to take upon
ourselves responsibility of being made new in order to enter, again and
again, into the world in which we live with a message of newness, to be
light, to be salt, to be joy, to be hope, to be faith, to be love, to be
surrender both to God and to men?
Let us reflect on it, because we all are sick one way or another; we all
are frail, all are weak, all are incapable of living to a full, even the
life which is offered us on earth! Let us reflect on it, and become
capable to open ourselves to God in such a way that He may work His
miracle of healing, make us new, but in order for us to bring our
newness, indeed God’s newness into the world in which we live. Amen. |
