The image of the Church as a field hospital for sinners – while not exhaustive – draws us back to something essential. “Healing” and “saving” are the same word in Greek, so there is an important meditation to be had on the the overlapping meanings. Christ does not come to heal or save merely as a gesture of superiority or magnanimity. Christ comes to heal and save the one(s) he loves as a spouse. It challenges our faith to consider that the one who created us has such lofty plans for a relationship with us. His actions of healing and saving are expressions of his devotedness – He wants to restore what may seem to worldly eyes to have been lost, defiled, worthless, etc. As a devoted husband only has eyes for his wife, Christ only has eyes for us. And as Christ sees our brokenness, our sicknesses, our weakness, our sin, He rushes in to repair. We must believe and trust that His level of commitment is excessive and that none of our wretchedness deters Him from His mission. He does not fear contamination, nor can He be crushed by the weight of our guilt. Let us fearlessly see ourselves as we are, and humbly touch Him in faith.
Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
We should be mindful of what Jesus means about fasting in this Gospel. Jesus is always with us, “I am with you until the consummation of the world.” However, that does not mean we should never fast. The time of the bridegroom is the moment leading up to Christ consummating His union with His Bride, the Church. When Christ dies on the Cross, He says, “It is consummated” – it is finished, it is accomplished, it is fulfilled. It is at the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross that his marriage – becoming one flesh with the people He came to save – is consummated. The fruit of that consummated union is the new life of the resurrection – the recreation in grace of those who unite themselves to Him and to His Body the Church by faith.
Saturday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
“In this life you will have trouble, but I have overcome the world.” (Jn. 16:33) It is useful to consider the connections between sickness and sin when we hear about Jesus’ miracles of healing. Physical healing enables us to live our lives the way we were meant to. So long as we are suffering from some kind of illness, it is as though we are prevented from being fully alive – captive in some ways. Sin is not just a spiritual illness that prevents us from living our lives freely and completely, it is also really connected to physical death. The remedies, or the medicine that brings healing is certainly helped by science, but more importantly has to do with God’s mercy. Any sickness that we experience, be it physical or spiritual – any suffering that plagues us – can become an occasion to turn our hearts more completely towards God and receive his mercy and healing. Perhaps that is why tears represent the most effective means of healing. So long as those tears are from the heart and directed to God’s mercy, we are then in a position to receive the most essential medicine: God’s merciful love.