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In the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost.
I should like to draw your attention to two
aspects of today's reading. The first one is that once again the
Lord Jesus Christ has performed a miracle on the Sabbath,
offending thereby those who kept to the law with strictness and
fanaticism. But indeed, it is not to offend that Christ did act
so.
God created the world in six days: and on the
seventh He rested from His labours, but He committed the world
to the charge of man. The whole of history, from the creation of
the world to the Second Coming is the hour of man, the hour when
man must help the creation to bear fruit, to be fulfilled, to be
united to its Maker. Man has failed in his vocation, we have
made of the world something ugly and monstrous while we were
called to make of it a fulfilment of beauty and of harmony with
God, and in itself. But Christ came, the only true man, the only
man in perfect harmony with God, the only man who could fulfil
the task of man. And His performing of these miracles on a
Sabbath day is a call to us to treat History, our day, the day
in which we live, as the day which God has committed to our
charge, and make of this day the day of the Lord.
Another feature which is not unconnected with
the first, is this: when we read in the Gospel of the mighty
acts of God, of His preaching, of His miracles, we turn to Him
in hope that He will work His wonders on us. And we forget that
Christ told us that He gave us an example which we should
follow, that what He has done, we should do; and indeed, in His
own words, that those who will believe in Him, will do greater
things even than those miracles which He had fulfilled. Our
vocation is to transfigure this world, thoroughly, but not to be
the constant objects of divine care. We, Christians, have made
Christianity anaemic, powerless, weak by treating history not as
the day of man, but the day when God must lavish upon us, a
little flock, His grace, His help and His mercy.
In fact He called us, on the evening of His
Resurrection, to go into the world as He came into the world, to
go into the world as messengers of love, as messengers of God,
and to fulfil our mission as He fulfilled His, at the cost of
our lives, pouring our lives for others to live, giving our
death, if necessary for others to come to life. We are very far
from our vocation; we run to God for help at the very moment
when He commands us to sally forth, to move onwards, to be His
presence in the world. Saint Paul understood that, when he said,
‘I fulfil in my body, - that is in all his person, soul and
flesh, - what was lacking in the sufferings of Christ’. And we
are called by Christ to forget ourselves, to turn away from
ourselves, because we are the stumbling-block that prevents us
from fulfilling our mission - our fear for our body, our fear of
moral, of mental agony, our fear of all things which it is our
vocation to fulfil.
We are afraid of death, and yet we proclaim
that Christ has overcome death: where is our faith? We grieve
when someone dies, and yet, we know that death is no more, that
there is only a temporary falling asleep while a living soul
rejoices face to face with her living God. We must learn to put
ourselves on one side, whenever fear, or greed, or anything
which is centred in us prevents us from fulfilling our mission,
the mission of being the messengers of divine love of divine
compassion, of divine truth. We must say to ourselves, ‘Get thee
behind me, Satan, thou art an adversary of God, because thou
thinkest not of the things of God’.
If we were truly Christian we could repeat
with the Book of Revelation the words of the Spirit and of the
Church, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, and come soon’ - and yet, we do not.
How many of us long for this coming, long for it, knowing that
His coming will mean our death to things of the earth and our
awakening face to face with God?..
We are sent to be in the world what Christ
has been, and the only reason why we are not, is that we do not
deny, reject ourselves in order to fulfil our mission. The blind
man met Christ, face to face, Christ healed him. How many around
us are blind - not physically blind, but with a blindness more
cruel than physical blindness: blind to the meaning of life,
blind to love, blind to compassion, blind to everything that
could make life into a warfare and a victory. It is for us to go
out as Christ went, with forgetfulness of self, taking up our
own cross, following Him, because He has said, that if we want
to get anywhere, it is Him we must follow. This is a challenge
to us. What happened in the days of the flesh, must happen now,
that we are the incarnate Body of Christ, and if we are not
capable of doing this, we must ask ourselves pertinent, cruel
questions and answer them ruthlessly, without mercy to
ourselves, and become the Christians which we are to be, which
we are called to be Christians in whom people can recognise
Christ Himself. Amen.
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