God never tires of healing us – Luke 6:6-11

First daily Mass preached at Holy Cross parish, Monday of the 23rd Week of Ordinary Time.

I’m tired.  It’s been a wonderful, thoroughly overwhelming, long weekend of prayer and celebration, hosting old friends, embracing new realities, running emotional gamuts, late nights, and early mornings, and now I find myself for the first time beginning a mass as a deacon and standing at this ambo to preach. 

I need a rest.  And that’s OK, because that’s how God made us.  We humans need rest, because God delights in rest.  On the seventh day, God looked around at all that He had made, saw that it was good, and rested.  That’s how the Israelites explained their curious Sabbath law: we rest to live out our vocation, to live as creatures created in the image of the God who rested.  And a beautiful law it was, to save humans from our tendency to work ourselves into the ground, to save slaves from that tendency in their masters, to protect family life, to promote health… humans need rest and the Sabbath law commanded it.  To heal outside of an emergency was to break that law.

God delights in rest but, God doesn’t need to rest.  God doesn’t need.  In the beginning, God looked at creation, saw that it was good, and then rested.  But when God looks, and sees flaw, sees wound, sees injury, sees suffering; then, God doesn’t rest.  God never tires of healing us.

This is the fatal misperception the scribes and Pharisees have every time they encounter Jesus.  It isn’t their occasional misstep in legal reasoning, it’s not seeing that Jesus is God.  Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath.  He knows what day it is.  Yes, it’s the Sabbath, but what trumps that is what he proclaimed in his inaugural sermon in Galilee: it is the day when the scripture is fulfilled, when the good news is announced to the poor, the captives released, the blind re-sighted, and the oppressed restored to freedom.  It is the day to help people see as God sees, to take the man with the withered hands neglected in the back of the room and bring him to the center.  To invite, stir up, urge compassion.  To heal.  The irony is: it’s no work.  Jesus just says the word, and the man’s hand is restored.

How do we need to be healed?  Hold it out to Jesus.  He never tires of healing.