Progressive Healing, Sixth Wednesday (II), February 16, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 16, 2022
James 1:19-27, Ps 15, Mk 8:22-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel Jesus does something noteworthy. Unlike most of the other recorded miracles of Jesus where he healed instantaneously by his touch or by his words, today he heals a blind man progressively, in stages. After Jesus puts spit on his eyelids, the man can see people looking like walking trees; the next time Jesus does it, the man could see everything distinctly. Jesus obviously had the power to heal him of his blindness instantaneously, but he progressively healed him, I believe, in order to help the man grow and persevere in hope and faith. Many of Jesus’ miracles, still today, are progressive. He heals us in stages, so that we, too, may grow in the Christian virtues of patience, perseverance and faith in contact with Jesus’ sacred humanity touching our own.
• Today we can ponder how Jesus seeks progressively to heal our sight, to heal our hearing, to heal our speech, and to heal our behavior. Jesus worked this miracle in the Gospel immediately before the scene tomorrow when he’ll ask the apostles and us who we believe him to be. The apostles needed God’s help to see who he really is. Some thought initially he was the Messiah, others didn’t, but they all needed to grasp that he was also the Son of God. Peter confesses him as the Christ and Son of God by the grace of the healing of his mind by God the Father. We, too, need that healing to see him and confess him.
• In the first reading today, St. James talks about the mirror of the Word of God, which is one way God progressively heals us. The more we get to know God’s holy Word, the more we get to know God, to know ourselves, and to know how we’re called to live in loving communion with him. St. James says positively that when we look into the mirror of the Word of God, we see who we’re supposed to be and how we’re called to respond to God’s help to change. When people look in a mirror, we do so to see if our hair is straight, if we still have shaving cream on the ears, if the double-windsor knot of a man’s tie is straight, if a woman’s make up came out the way it should. If there’s anything awry as we look in the mirror, we then try to correct it. That’s the vision that the Word of God gives to us, to help us see ourselves as we are and to help us to correct ourselves by bringing ourselves into alignment with God’s word and will. That’s the first healing God gives us, of our sight, to see ourselves as we really ought to be, to remember our fundamental identity. In the Responsorial Psalm today, we see the “mirror image” of the one who will live on the Lord’s mountain, the mirror image of who God wants us to be and become: “He who walks blamelessly and does justice; who thinks the truth in his heart and slanders not with his tongue. Who harms not his fellow man, nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor; who lends not his money at usury and accepts no bribe against the innocent.”
• The next progressive healing God wants to give us is of our hearing and speech. St. James is very clear today about the way a Christian ought to listen and converse: “Know this, my dear brothers and sisters, everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. … If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, his religion is vain.” Many people, rather than being quick to hear and slow to speak, are instead slow to hear and quick to speak. When we’re quick to hear and slow to speak, it shows that we recognize how much we need to learn and docile. It also shows how much we desire to enter into another’s experience, to hear other’s opinions, even more than sharing our own. When we’re slow to hear and quick to speak, it shows that we believe we have little to learn from others and care more about our own experiences and thoughts than we do others’. If we can’t bridle our tongue and listen, St. James says, our worship of God is worthless because then we won’t really even listen to him, especially when he speaks to us about how we glorify him in loving others.
• How does this progressive healing of our hearing and speech happen? How can we become people of bridled tongues, who are slow to speak and quick to hear? The Lord Jesus seeks to take us, like he took the man in the Gospel, aside from the crowd one by one to heal us. He does that certainly in our mental prayer, which is so crucial to our healing and growth. But he does it above all in the Sacrament of Confession. It’s there where he helps us little by little to see ourselves as we are in the mirror of his love and convert with his assistance to become who we see in the mirror of his own life as the Word made flesh. It’s where he strengthens us from within so that we might become his mirrors in the world. In the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, Christ ministers to us individually and purifies our sight, our speech, our hearing, our heart, our entire life. We need to love and be grateful for this Sacrament, as grateful as the blind man in today’s Gospel was to receive this gift of the Lord Jesus.
• St. James famously today calls us to be not only hearers of the Word but doers of the Word. May he intercede for us that we may put into practice what God has taught us today about the healing of our senses and heart, as we prepare not to have Jesus put his saliva on our eyelids but to receive his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity on the saliva of our tongues as we become one with him and give him permission to carry out his progressive healing from within us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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