GOD IS THE GIVER OF LIFE AND NOT DEATH
God from all intent and purpose wants us to have life and have it in abundance; he is the giver of life and not death. This mystery of God´s generosity of life to us is difficult to understand, especially in a world where there are too many miseries around us.
Human sufferings, miseries, death, and evil are not God´s making or doing. It came because of Satan and the evil ones as well as the choices we make in life. The culture of death around us today are all man´s making.
God, through his Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life who generates, operates and directs the life of the Spirit in us. This so because he created us in his image and likeness. In God, it is all light and life and no alteration of darkness or death.
Since our life, both physical and spiritual are rooted in God. It is important to be appreciative of the gift of life and to use it graciously.
OUR THEME
The readings of this Sunday invite us to see in God the origin of all goodness. He is the giver of life both physical and spiritual. Hence, he is the only one who can restore them to wholeness through healing and raising them to life again after the corruption of disease and death, respectively.
The readings equally urge and challenge us to be grateful for our health in body and soul and to use God’s gifts of life and health responsibly. In all reality, our life is either we live by faith or by fear. Indeed, what makes the difference to the situations around us is your faith or fear approach to life.
Thus, the gift of healing to health or restoring to life is all through faith. Faith that defies all odds and obstacle. Faith comes through the personal experience of life or the intervention of others in our situations through faith in God.
FIRST READING: WISDOM 1:13-15, 2:23-24
All that God does is wholesome, and he intends us to enjoy a blessed immortality in Him and with Him forever. God is the Creator and Source of life. He does not make death (evil or bad things), nor does He rejoice in the destruction of life.
Interestingly, the author of the Book of Wisdom takes up a key idea from Genesis that we were made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27.). The implication here is that God cannot be destructive toward his image or likeness in us not by disease or death.
The same Genesis account ends up with a solid and fundamental fact that all God created was good and indeed they are very good. This is the remark of the author of Genesis, which means no bad, evil or death, violent or destruction culture was ever found in God.
Death, dying and decaying has no place in God´s plan for humanity. It came out of man´s free will to choose evil or good. The just or righteous with the hope of immortality or eternity do no experience death. Death is the product of sin and it pertains to the devil and all who live in sins.
The psalmist in Psalm 30 invites us to be grateful to God, “I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.” He is the God who rescues us from the pit of hell, evil, destruction, and death.
Actually, Psalm 30 celebrates Christ’s victory over death, sin, evil and the devil. The Psalm refrain, “I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me,” allows us to join the Psalm in thanksgiving, by Jesus’ Sacrificial death, we, too, have been rescued from spiritual death by having our sins forgiven.
SECOND READING: 2 CORINTHIANS 8:7, 9, 13-15
Paul asks his well-off Corinthians to help the Christian poor in Jerusalem. Paul asked the Corinthians to be generous in their contributions to a fund being collected for this suffering, starving brothers and sisters. The Church of Jerusalem is the Mother Church with a predominantly Jewish population, but she was poor.
Therefore, Paul desired and encouraged all the Gentiles’ Churches to remember and help that Church, which was their mother in the faith. The strength of the Church is the unity and strength of its members.
For Paul, the only true and real way of living the Christian life is through generosity with others, especially the less privileged. This generosity does not only include material things but also one´s time, energy and being. A Generosity that driven by the spirit of self-giving or self-donation to God and others.
Hence, St. Paul invites us to balance life, faith and reality, to know the difference between faith-based reality prayer and a mindful wishes prayer. That is the Christian not only in believing or professing faith in God. It is also a practical life of serving and helping the needy or poor among us.
We see that Jesus’s generosity is central in today’s readings as well: Paul describes Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as “the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
ON THE IDEA OF CHRISTIAN GENEROSITY PAUL CITED FIVE REASONS:
(i) He cites the example of others. He tells them how generous the Macedonian Churches had been. They were poor and in trouble but they gave all they had, far more than anyone could have expected. It is not always those who are most wealthy who are most generous. As the common saying has it, “It is the poor who help the poor,” because they know what poverty is like.
(ii) He cites the example of Jesus Christ. For Paul Jesus’s sacrifice did not begin on the Cross. It did not even begin with his birth. It began in heaven when he laid his glory by and consented to come to earth. Paul’s challenge to the Christian is, “With that tremendous example of generosity before you, how can you hold back?”
(iii) He cites their own record. They have been foremost in everything. Can they then lag in this? If men were only true to their own highest standards, if we all lived always at our best, what a difference it would make!
(iv) He stresses the necessity of putting fine feeling into fine action. The Corinthians had been the first to feel the appeal of this scheme. But a feeling which remains only a feeling, a pity which remains a pity only of the heart, a fine desire that never turns into a fine deed, is a sadly truncated and frustrating thing. The tragedy of life so often is, not that we have no high impulses, but that we fail to turn them into actions.
(v) He reminds them that. life has a strange way of evening things up. Far more often than not we find that it is measured to us with the same measure as we measure to others. Life has a way of repaying bounty with bounty, and the sparing spirit with the sparing spirit.
THE GOSPEL: MARK 5:21-43
The Gospel describes two cures of Jesus blended into a single story: the haemorrhaging woman for twelve years and the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus. These miracles demonstrated much about Christ and God.
These healings teach us that Jesus wills life and wills full life for all God’s children.
They also reveal Jesus as a generous, kind, compassionate God Who wills that men should live their wholesome lives fully, giving us further proof of the Divine power and the Infinite Mercy of our Saviour.
These miracles were worked by Jesus as a reward for the trusting Faith of a synagogue ruler and a woman with a haemorrhage.
Finally, it teaches us that faith in Christ Jesus is victory over death and seemingly impossible human situations. Wherever there is death either through sin, disease and distress of any kind. Faith in Christ restores all things anew.
A SUFFERER’S LAST HOPE: MARK 5:25-29
The two stories demonstrate Jesus as the giver of life and restorer of health to all those who show convincing faith or even a superstitious faith in him.
In the story, there are all the elements of tragedy. A twelve years old girl at the threshold of womanhood died suddenly and an adult woman suffered a haemorrhage for twelve years without remedy or hope of healing.
The stories were all about surmounting stereotype or self-imposing limitations. Jairus a synagogue official must have reservations, prejudices and misgivings about Christ. As well as he must have pride, dignity in himself for his leading position in the community and maybe the public opinion of him leading seeking help from an outcast: Jesus Christ.
Likewise, the woman with the stereotype of being a woman defies haemorrhage that makes her unclean or impure to come close to a rabbi talk less of touching the hem of his cloak. This uncleanliness shut her off from the worship of God and the fellowship of her friends (Lev.15:25-27.
Yet, she defies stereotype and or the opinion of people who may know her and mustered the courage to do what her mind and instinct told her to do. She may have heard of Jesus as the healer who restores the health of mind and body and giver of life. But she had this problem–her trouble was an embarrassing thing; to go in the crowd and to state, it openly was something she could not face; and so she decided to try to touch Jesus in secret.
There was desperation in the two stories that Jairus and the woman to seek Jesus out as the last solution. They went head-on defying all odds and obstacle to reach Jesus through faith.
THE COST OF HEALING: Mark 5:30-34
Jesus´ realization that power or energy has gone out of him tells us something about his total self-giving. It tells us the cost of healing. Every time Jesus healed anyone it took something out of him. Here is a universal rule of life. We will never produce anything great unless we are prepared to put something of ourselves, of our very life, of our very soul into it. This is why he is the giver of life and restorer of health because these are precious gifts that entail total self-emptying.
The lack of sensitivity or empathy of the disciples of Jesus who walk in the midst of many human pains, sufferings and tragedies but could not catch into it is a real tragedy. One of the tragedies of life is the strange insensitiveness of the human mind especially of religious leaders to pains and agonies around them most times.
As Christians, we need to pray for common sense, but sometimes too pray for that sensitive, imaginative insight which can see into the pains, sufferings, and agonies of bodies and hearts of others.
DESPAIR AND HOPE: Mark 5:35-39
Furthermore, we learn something about the woman and her sense of relief at her admittance or confession to what has happened to her. It was all so difficult and so humiliating. However, once she had told the whole truth to Jesus, the terror and the trembling were gone and a wave of relief flooded her heart.
When she had made her pitiful confession she found him very kind. It is never hard to confess to one who understands like Jesus: the giver of life and restorer of health. Many people had difficulty in life telling their stories of pains, anguish, sadness and tragedy. They need a non-judgmental individual to open up their bottled pains and sorrows to be healed or relieved.
The commotion of wailing, weeping, lamenting of the flutes, the screams of the mourners, the passionate appeals to the dead in Jairus´ house is a common act of mourning the dead. As well, the renting of garments, tearing of hair and the beating of the beast are one big mark of mourning the dead in Israel.
THE DIFFERENCE FAITH MAKES: Mark 5:40-43
Just like the story of the woman with a haemorrhage´s healing was based on her personal faith. The story of Jairus´ daughter raising from dead was also based on interventional faith in action. This passage is a story of contrasts between God and humans, hope and despair.
There is a contrast between the despair of the mourners and the hope of Jesus. “Don’t bother the Teacher,” they said. “There’s nothing anyone can do now.” “Don’t be afraid,” said Jesus, “only believe.” In the one place, it is the voice of despair that speaks; in the other the voice of hope.
There is a contrast between the unrestrained distress of the mourners and the calm serenity of Jesus. They were wailing and weeping and tearing their hair and rending their garments in a paroxysm of distress; he was calm and quiet and serene and in control.
For those who have faith and hope in God death is an eternal sleep to be in the presence of God forever. It is a transitional change of our state of being limited by space and time into immortality of glorious transformation. While for faithless people death is a loss, a pain and a tragedy with no hope of the resurrection or to eternal life.
Why this difference? It was due to Jesus’ perfect confidence and trust in God. The worst human disaster can be met with courage and gallantry when we meet it with God. They laughed him to scorn because they thought his hope was groundless and his calm mistaken. But the great fact of the Christian life is that what looks completely impossible with men is possible with God.
Four basic things stand out in the celebration of this 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
I. Death, sufferings, pains and sicknesses have no place in God´s plan for us, for the creation, or the universe. All pains, sufferings, sicknesses and death are the devil´s doing or our own making as well.
II. God is compassionate and empathetic. There is no shadow of death or pains of sicknesses in Him. He is the giver of life and restorer of health no matter the circumstances.
III. God gives us life, health, blessings and grace without reservation. His generosity in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit knows no bound. We are invited and challenged to a life of generosity with total self-giving to others. (Materially, personally with our time, energy and self).
IV. Faith in God surmounts all obstacles, fears, worries and limitations we place on ourselves or situations of life might place on us. God cannot heal us of sicknesses or restore us to life from our dead condition or situation of life if we have faith in believing in Him.
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS
A. What are the dead situations facing you or your loved ones? Sicknesses? Failures in personal life, marital life, family life, economic or spiritual life?
B. What is your image of God? A brutal and insensitive god? Or a compassionate and empathetic god? Do you know your image or impression of God determines how well you relate with him?
C. Do you live by personal faith conviction or the intervening faith conviction of others in our crisis moments?
D. How generous are you with your resource, time, energy, life or faith to help others in need.
OUR PRAYER
Lord Jesus Christ, you are a generous God and the giver of life and restorer of health. You invite us to live by faith, which means or entails hanging onto God where human reason and human capacity stop. Help us in our crisis of faith to know we are all overcomers in you: the author and finisher of our faith. Amen!
