Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2009
Wis 1: 13-15: 2:23-24;
2 Cor 8:7,9,13-15;
Mk 5:21-43
Most people will go to any lengths to avoid talking or thinking about death. Most people fear death, and when it comes for us or for those close to us, we are angry and even more afraid. In the last few days our newspapers and TV have been filled with death--the deaths of Ed McMahan, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. In the last week we have had the funerals of two women who were active in this parish for many years. People spend billions of dollars avoiding death, delaying is effects, or trying to remain perpetually young. But as the old saying goes, the mortality rate in life is 100%. No lone leaves this world alive.
Often the death of a pet is a child's first introduction to death. Many adults can remember burying a pet turtle or goldfish in an old Q-tips box in the backyard. Sometimes the introduction to death is more painful such as the death of a cat or dog. But tragically, it involves not the death of pets but of grandparents, parents, or brothers or sisters. It is usually the occasion for the first questions about death and the fumbling attempts of parents to explain that all living things die some day. It is also at this point that children get the firsts hints about heaven or everlasting life -- the place where we are united with those we have loved. But then the child asks: why does everything die? Adults usually don't have a terrific answer.
God did not make death. The point is that all that comes from God is good. All life was created to endure. The Jewish religion had developed respect for the natural world, especially human life. God takes no delight whatsoever in death and destruction, and these are never God's intentions. But if God made everything good and takes no joy in death and destruction and evil, why doesn't God just fix everything?
In our Bible readings today God is not just talking about death but about the sort of unnatural and avoidable situation that results in human action such as war, violence, starvation, disease, and injustice. We do not often encounter real evil. We read about it. We see it on television, but rarely does real, frightening, unapologetic evil show itself to us. These are human actions rather than caused by God. We have no reason to be angry at God for them. Natural biological death is not a punishment but an essential part of being created.
Today, we are given an opportunity to reflect on death, but not just the end of human life. We are given an opportunity to face death in its less recognizable forms. Death comes when the heart stops beating, but we come face to face with death as a separation from God when our religious faith dies, and we no longer believe in anything. God becomes dead to us. Our life has no longer any meaning.
I just read about the woman who had suffered from haemorrhages for 12 years. She had truly suffered physically, both from her ailment and from doctors who did not know how to heal her. She was also suffering financially as she had exhausted her savings trying to be healed. Despite suffering physically and economically, there was something worse. She was suffering socially and spiritually. Because of the bleeding she was thought to be ritually impure. She was considered a bad a person, an evil person. She could not engage in any public worship, and she certainly would have been banned from the Temple. Anyone who had physical contact with her would have also been rendered ritually impure. So few persons would have had anything to do with her. This was a living death. She had a life with no meaning.
She must have heard about Jesus. Knowing that something had to change, she violated all sorts of cultural rules to get to Jesus, the healer. In this decision to go to Jesus, she found her healing. The greatest benefit was not the ending of her sickness. It was restoring her to the community. It was making it possible for her to have a purpose once again.
The unrecognizable forms of death are those that prevent our life from having meaning. A man once told me of dealing poorly with his wife's death. He blamed God for taking his wife away from him. His anger over it colored everything. His friends and family, even his children, tried to avoid him. He tells how he had gone to the funeral of a friend's mother, the first funeral he had attended since the death of his wife 10 years before. At that funeral he heard the priest say that love cannot be used in the past-tense. Not only do we still love those who have died, but through the death and resurrection of Jesus we can still know their love for us.
Going to the cemetery, the man went to his wife's grave. He said he longed for his wife's love again. He said he pleaded with God to let him feel that love again. And somehow, in his tears, he felt it. He says he knows what it feels like to have been raised from the dead.
Another form of death can take place when a person at retirement. A person's worth and whole life can often be employment, and without it there seems to be nothing. But this is a time when a person can place in their life something for which they did not have the time such as volunteering at church or the community. I met a man recently who has been doing volunteer services for five years. He said he has never felt so much contentment or felt so vital in his entire life. He, too, says he knows what it means to be ''given a new life.''
God want us to have life and to have it abundantly. Life can deal out many painful situations, but only we can decide how we will respond to them. At times our negativity and doubt are the greatest hindrance to God's power to work miracles in our midst. At these times try to listen to Jesus' very simple but powerful words: Do not be afraid, just have faith
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