He was scared. I was sitting with Br. Thomas, a Holy Cross
brother 30 odd years my senior, and I knew he was scared. They’d found out why he’d lost his appetite
and hadn’t been able to keep food down: it was because of the cancers in his GI
tract. He’d been told about how the
course of chemo would go, how hard it would be, and he was scared. We talked, I tried to offer comfort, to just
be there, and we prayed, we prayed for healing.
I next visited him right after we’d received a new prognosis from the
doctor: the cancer had spread much more aggressively than they’d first
thought. The chemo was now useless, there
was nothing to do but manage the pain before he died. Given how scared the prospect of chemo had
made him, I’ll admit that I was scared to go back into his room and be with him,
but I went. He was breath-takingly
peaceful. God had healed Br.
Thomas. He hadn’t taken away his cancer,
but he had cast out his fear. It wasn’t
the healing I wanted. But I couldn’t
deny God had healed. I couldn’t blind
myself to the clearly manifest work of God’s hand. I had to swallow pride, fear and sorrow to do
it, but I couldn’t not give thanks. At Brother’s
funeral Mass a month or so later, together we offered the sacrifice of the
Mass, our deepest form of thanksgiving.
God
heals. God heals, but not always in the
way we expect it. Naaman was a
successful Syrian military commander who contracted some kind of skin
disease. Earlier in the chapter, from
which we read part of as our first reading, we hear the very human
story of Naaman not really wanting to do anything about this, until his wife
cajoles him into going to see some Israelite prophet who’s known as a
healer. Elisha the prophet tells him to
bathe seven times in the Jordan, and Naaman complains that it’s not even a very
impressive river (they have much better ones in Syria) and it’s stupid and he
shan’t. Eventually, his servant
persuades him to try it and he consents (probably dreading the long trek back
to Syria just to tell his wife he didn’t go through with it). That’s where our reading picks up. He bathes and he comes out healed of his
leprosy. But not just that. We might expect him to see his new skin and
say to Elisha, “I’ll admit it, your river’s not much, but your god’s pretty
powerful.” He sees deeper than
that. It’s not just the lesions have
fallen from his skin; the scales have fallen from his eyes – he sees that the
God of Israel is the God of the world, the one true God! He becomes a monotheist at a time when most
Israelites aren’t! His first response to
is want to thank Elisha the prophet, but he soon learns that that’s not quite
right and he lets go of his need to be in charge, he follows the natural
movement from awareness of God’s graceful power to worship; he gives a
sacrifice of praise. Worried that he won’t
be able to worship Israel’s God in Syria, he even takes two mule-loads of earth
back with him so as he won’t be offering sacrifice on alien soil. The healing changes his life, and not just
his skin: from awareness of his healing, he comes to faithful awareness of God
which moves him to worship, to sacrifice, to give thanks.
God
heals, but we don’t always realize it.
The nine lepers who didn’t return did trust in Jesus’ word. As lepers, they would have been completely
driven out of society as impure people. The
priests functioned as sort of ‘purity inspectors,’ so Jesus tells them to go
see the priests so as they would be declared clean and allowed to return to
their place in society. And they
go. They risk ridicule to go see the
priests. But, they don’t realize they’ve
been healed. The defenses, the walls
they must have built up over years of being ostracized, excluded, mocked, hated…
they had learnt to hate their own skin so much that they didn’t even notice
they’d been healed. They’d accepted the
names they’d been called, they saw themselves as unclean and couldn’t begin to
see themselves as healed. The one, a
foreigner like Naaman, is more perceptive.
He realized he had been healed.
He never gave in to despair, never dreaded that God had given up on
him. He knew God, God of the universe,
was powerful enough to heal even him.
And now, he knew: he was healed.
That awareness takes over and leads him inexorably to worship, to
praise, to thanksgiving. Not just his
skin was healed; the scales fell off his eyes: he knew that by falling to his
knees in front of Jesus, he was worshiping God. Something greater than the Temple is
here.
God
heals, but not always in the way we expect, and we don’t always realize it. A growth in virtue, a drop in anxiety or
frustraition, the washing away of sins in baptism or reconciliation, a lowered
temptation, a conquered vice, a renewed capacity to love… God heals. To know yourself is to know yourself as
healed; to know yourself as in need of healing, as worth healing and to know
God as all powerful, all gracious, a healer.
God heals, and opens our eyes to see it.
And He’s gracious enough to hang around afterward, so as we can fall at
his feet and say, “thank you, thank you, thank you.” So as we can say, “Please… this is the
healing I need now.”
We will
soon embark on the Eucharistic Prayer, the most profound form of thanksgiving
the Church has to offer. Like the
Samaritan leper, we fall to our knees in adoration; like Naaman, we offer
sacrifice, making present anew the One Sacrifice Christ offered for us on
Calvary. How much richer would that
moment be if we entered into it fully mindful of how God has healed us, is
healing us! We’ll never know it all, but
for the glimpses we’re granted of His tender hand… Thanks be to God!
Beautiful, Adam! Solid fare for the spirit.
ReplyDeleteJustin Bartkus