God’s Medicine for the Healing of the Just, Ninth Friday (I), June 9, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Portland, Oregon
Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor
June 9, 2023
Tob 11:5-17, Ps 146, Mk 12:35-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Book of Tobit on which we’ve been meditating all week is about God’s healing. The quiet hero of the book is the Archangel Raphael, whose name means “The Healing [of Medicine] of God.” We see in the book how God heals both Sarah, as we saw yesterday, and Tobit as we see today. God heals them after some suffering, to perfect them who were already good and virtuous. That’s an important point. They were both “just,” and were permitted by God to suffer in order to help them both advance in faith. God already had set up his medicine for them in the facts of the case: he had had Tobit earn and bury money in Media so that, after Tobit couldn’t go himself, Tobiah could, he could get bitten by the fish with the healing properties, he could meet Sarah and become an instrument of the healing of her and later of her father. We see the particularly “galling” way Tobit was healed in today’s Gospel, by his son’s smearing his cataracted eyes with gall from a fish who had bit him, the same fish that had supplied the heart and liver that was burned to heal Sarah and Tobias from the wiles of the pagan god of lust in this allegory. There’s a clear sacramental allusion in this healing by something a little gross, much like Jesus would later heal someone of blindness by wiping saliva on his eyes. As soon as Tobit was cured, he rejoiced that he could see his son. He could in fact see much more clearly than he did before he was blinded by bird droppings four years earlier. His vision had been enriched by faith. The Lord, indeed, as we prayed in the Psalm, gives sight to the blind!
• We see Jesus seeking to do a similar healing in the Gospel. He was trying to help the scribes and those around him in the Temple see what God the Father had revealed to St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi, that the Messiah would also be God. That’s what was happening in Jesus’ question: David who traditionally is understood to be the one who composed Psalm 110 that Jesus quotes, called the Messiah — who would be his descendent according to the flesh — “Lord.” That’s precisely who Jesus was, not merely David’s descendent according to the flesh, but also his Lord and Creator. Jesus was opening the eyes of the minds of his contemporaries to a much deeper understanding of who the Messiah is, to help them to be able to embrace better what was coming within a few days in his Passion.
• Someone who had received the gift of vision from the Lord and who helped his contemporaries to see not just the truth of God but the beauty of God and of the faith is the great fourth century Deacon and Doctor of the Church, St. Ephrem, from Syria. He was a prolific teacher in an age of rampant heresies against the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit. At the request of his bishop, he opened up a school in Nisibis to teach the faith aright and inoculate people against false teachings. But he also was an incredible poet and songwriter, putting the truths of the faith into more than 3,000 songs so that Christians could learn and pass on the faith through music. He was called the “Harp of the Holy Spirit” because not only did he teach clearly about the Holy Spirit but taught through the Holy Spirit who led him to some of the deepest insights about the truths of our faith in the history of the Church. He expressed them not just in dry theological treatises but in poetry and in liturgical and sacred music, because as Pope Benedict XVI said several years ago in a Catechesis on what we can all learn from him, St. Ephrem always connected beauty and truth so that the truth could be prayed. There is a union between our worship and our way of life, just as Jesus was saying between our communion with him and communion with others and St. Ephrem helped the people of his day to see this connection. Among St. Ephrem’s most treasured and renowned mystical teachings were his writings on the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Spirit. In one poem, St. Ephrem writes from the perspective of Jesus, “Take, eat, entertaining no doubt of faith, because this is My Body, and whoever eats it in faith eats in it Fire and Spirit.’” To enter into Communion with the Lord is to consume “Fire” and “Spirit,” a fire and a Holy Spirit that can cure us of our blindness of lack of faith and coldness of heart and strengthen us to live in communion with Christ. We prayed at the beginning of Mass, “Pour into our hearts, O Lord, we pray, the Holy Spirit, at whose prompting the Deacon Saint Ephrem exulted in singing your mysteries and from whom he received the strength to serve you alone.” The same Fire and Spirit that strengthened him wants to strengthen us to worship God and love our neighbor.
• As we receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, we receive Fire and Spirit. Through this great Sacrament, God wants to heal and open our eyes to see the Eucharist not routinely but with a new vision, especially in terms of how we are called to center our whole life on Jesus whom we receive, to become living walking monstrances carrying God within out to the streets here of Portland and beyond as we prepare for Corpus Christi on Sunday and cooperate in the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States. St. Ignatius of Antioch called Jesus in the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality.” Jesus in the Holy Eucharist is the greatest source of God’s healing. The Divine Physician places himself not of our eyes but within us to heal not just our vision but so much more, making it possible for us to become the “gall” that can go out, attached to Him and all his healing power, to help others to see anew by attaching truth to beauty and faith to every aspect of human life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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