Christ's compassion for the sick was genuine, writes Father Vincent Hawkswell, but he didn't heal all the sick. “His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Fifth
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First
Reading: Jb
7:1-4, 6-7
Second
Reading: 1 Cor
9:16-19, 22-23
Gospel
Reading: Mk
1:29-39
This world is not our final destination. It does not contain our ultimate goal. It does not explain our purpose.
The three central figures in this Sunday’s liturgy all knew it. Job had enjoyed this world’s goods in plenty, but God took them all, including his health and his children. “My eye will never again see good,” he said, but he nevertheless made a blanket resignation of himself to God’s will: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!”
Paul was a free man, a citizen of the Roman Empire. However, he made himself “a slave to all” in order to “win more of them” for Christ. “I do it all for the sake of the Gospel,” he said, “so that I may share in its blessings.”
Christ cured “many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons.” However, with this work still unfinished, he went off by himself to pray. With people still seeking cures, he said, “Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”
Job, Paul, and Christ all focused on the next world, not this. That is where their priorities lay.
Christ’s compassion for the sick was genuine. In fact, he went so far as to identify himself with them. On the last day, he will say to those who do not know him, but have visited the sick, “Come; you have my Father’s blessing; inherit the kingdom prepared for you,” for “as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me.”
However, Christ “did not heal all the sick,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes. “His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover.”
Seen in the light of the next world, sickness can even be a blessing. “In illness, man experiences his powerlessness, his limitations, and his finitude,” the Catechism explains. “Every illness can make us glimpse death.”
There are two ways to respond. “Illness can lead to anguish, self-absorption, sometimes even despair and revolt against God,” the Catechism says. However, “it can also make a person more mature, helping him discern in his life what is not essential so that he can turn toward that which is.” In fact, very often, “illness provokes a search for God and a return to him.” It “becomes a way to conversion.”
How precious, then, are our last days of illness and suffering! How much we should value them! How wrong we would be to shorten our lives by euthanasia, either for ourselves or for others!
Christ’s compassion for the sick was so profound that on the cross, he “took away the sin of the world, of which illness is only a consequence,” the Catechism says. By his passion and death he gave “a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive passion.”
How often we hear, when a man dies, “He has lost his battle with cancer.” The truth is quite different: if we live our pain and suffering in union with Christ, death is our victory over cancer, for it is our entry into full union with the Holy Trinity, the beginning of the perfect happiness for which God made us. That is why a Catholic funeral looks ahead, to the new life, unlike secular “celebrations of life,” which look backward, to the old life.
St. Therese of Lisieux said, “I am not dying; I am entering life.” St. Paul said, “To me, ‘life’ means Christ; hence dying is so much gain.” St. Teresa of Avila said, “I want to see God and, in order to see him, I must die.”
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