A Homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost

+ This morning in her Sacred Liturgy our Holy Mother, the Church has us contemplate one of the most powerful phrases of the Gospel, uttered by the woman who had suffered from a serious illness for twelve years and whom, as we know from the Gospel of Saint Mark, had spent everything she had, unsuccessfully, in seeking a cure. In the midst of a crowd she reaches for the hem of Our Lord’s cloak with the confidence that:  “If I only touch his garment, I shall be made well.”
 
Let us ponder this a little. Twelve years of serious illness permeated by hopes that this physician or that doctor may well help find a cure, only to be frustrated again and again, is not nothing. Indeed, it implies an agonising suffering that has become a way of life—something that, despite two more millennia of scientific and medical research, is still known in our day. So, too, is the phenomenon of spending all that we have in the hope of a cure, but in vain.
 
When a seemingly incurable condition afflicts us thus, life can be reduced to little more than physical pain and the threat of penury.  ‘Normal’ progress in work, family life, etc., is severely impeded. Indeed, the abnormal can become normal; the afflictions that beset us can become whom we are. Hope of any improvement or healing is quietly abandoned as unrealistic. Our illness defines us.
 
The same is true for a psychological or moral malady. We may at first try to address issues that arise, but it is all too easy to surrender and to cohabit with the demons that infest us, allowing the abnormal to become the norm. We see this in those who settle into lifestyles contrary to the moral law—and in the legislation of States who seek not only to normalise the abnormal, but who seek to protect their absurdities from all criticism by means of so-called “anti-discrimination” laws which themselves discriminate against any notion of objective truth.
 
We see it in those who have come to indulge unacceptable behaviours as a part of their personality that they expect others simply to accept. Any notion of disorder—moral or psychological—is banished by the deification of the subjective. Any concept of the objective or of truth is submerged in the squalor of the particular situation that has been normalised. Any call to conversion is silenced by the psychological or moral sloth which has been befriended.
 
This ongoing desperation is also seen in those who speak often of vocational discernment. “I would if…”, we hear. “I can’t do this…” they excuse. “I tried, but…” they retort—offering a myriad of reasons why the monastery, seminary or community is simply not as it should be, themselves setting the required standards whilst completely ignoring the necessity for their own conversion of life and the self-abandonment to that to which Almighty God has called them. This malady often lingers much more than twelve years, leaving what was once a young man or woman zealous for the things of God little more than a depressed middle-aged failure of their own making.
 
And we know only too well that the vocation of Christian marriage is by no means immune to the same disease, with all too many spouses investing elsewhere that which by means of their vows made before God belongs to each other and to their family, with catastrophic results. Mutatis mutandis the same can be said for those who are bound to God by means of monastic or religious vows or by the solemn promises made at ordination. If we somehow contract a virus and allow it to grow into a disease and then get used to living with it, or worse, we are seduced by it and even court its apparent goods and welcome it, the malady can rapidly become whom we are, insidiously thwarting God’s plan and the good He intended us from all eternity to accomplish.
 
To each of us, most particularly if we are suffering and ill in any of these ways, the Church addresses the words of the Gospel—the Good News—of Jesus Christ this morning: “If I only touch His garment, I shall be made well.” This is no magic panacea: it is an act of profound and humble faith made when all else has proved vain and futile. The woman does not presume to address Our Lord personally. Like the tax-collector at the back of the Temple (Lk 18:13) she does not put herself forward. She simply begs for the graces she needs with utter faith in the Christ of God.
 
My brothers and sisters, almost without knowing it we can become infected with all manner of vices and maladies and conditions which do the devil’s work for him in distracting us from that which Almighty God wills for us and requires from us. Pride and any of the other deadly sins will move into our souls and take up residence at the first opportunity we give them, making of us icons of themselves even against all that for which we once hoped.
 
Let us examine our spiritual, moral and vocational health, then, and be prepared to face the reality of what we find. Where we have allowed something that is not truly of God to take root and grow, we must act—even, and especially, when the roots have penetrated very deeply. If we can only muster the humility to reach out and touch His garment, most particularly in the Sacrament of Confession (where in fact He reaches out to us to touch and heals us), we shall have the consolation of knowing the import of His saving words: “Take heart…your faith has made you well.” +