Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
June 26, 2021
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we encounter him work two dramatic miracles.
- The healing of the woman with the hemorrhage is one of the literally most touching of all Jesus’ cures. Jesus was on his way with Jairus, the synagogue leader, to care for his daughter who at the time was on the point of death. St. Mark tells us that a large crowd was following Jesus and pressing in on him. As happens in almost any big crowd, people were bumping into him left and right. Yet in the midst of all of that commotion on the move, Jesus is touched in a different way by this anonymous woman — and Jesus immediately knew he was touched differently. The suffering woman believed that if she could just touch the tassel of Jesus’ garments, she would be cured. And she was not to be disappointed.
- Jesus, upon feeling his healing power go out in response to her faith, stopped and asked, somewhat remarkably, “Who touched my clothes?” It would be like if an ambulance driver speeding to attend to a 911 call all of a sudden heard a faint, friendly tap of the horn and then slammed on the brakes trying to find out who was trying to say hello. Jesus stopped, and doubtless to the confusion and concern of Jairus, began to ask who had come into contact with the hem of his tunic. It shows how big the crowd must have been banging into him that he didn’t even see the woman approach him to touch the edge of his garments. “Who touched my clothes?,” he kept asking. Jesus was never interested in merely working miracles of bodily healing. Those were always a prelude to the greater miracle of healing souls, and that healing happened and happens through a personal relationship with him. That’s why he never worked “mass miracles of healing,” but always cured people one-by-one, because he wanted to have that personal bond. So Jesus wanted to meet and enter into a relationship with the person he had just physically cured.
- After Jesus’ question, the woman approached with fear and trembling, fell down before him and told him everything, including how she had sought to pick-pocket a healing miracle from him without his knowledge. She was afraid not just because the stop she had caused Jesus to make was going to prove fatal for the daughter of the understandably impatient, powerful synagogue leader, but because by her touching Jesus with her effusion of blood, she was making him ritually impure according to the Jewish law and incapable without ablutions of entering the synagogue. That ritual impurity meant that she had been suffering not only physically for twelve years, but also socially and religiously: because of her bleeding, she couldn’t touch anyone and was basically cut off from human contact; she was even, in a sense, cut off from God by not being able to enter the synagogue. She probably thought that Jesus and everyone else with whom she would have come into contact trying to get to Jesus would have been furious with her. But Jesus would address all those problems. He spoke to her tenderly, called her “Daughter,” and said, “Your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease.” He made the miracle public so that she could be restored totally to the community, to the worship of God, and to a relationship with God-in-the-flesh.
- The miracle of the healing of Jairus’ daughter likewise began with a touch. Jairus, the leader of the Capernaum synagogue where Jesus was already becoming controversial, didn’t care if the rabbis and the members of the community would criticize him for reaching out to Jesus, who was already highly suspect in their eyes and was no longer welcome in their synagogue. Jairus loved his daughter too much to care about his career. With fatherly abandon, he ran up to Jesus, threw himself at his feet, doubtless grabbed onto them, and, as St. Mark says, begged Jesus repeatedly to come and lay his hands on his daughter that she might get well and live. Jairus knew that there was a power to Jesus’ hands, to his healing touch, and he wanted his daughter to feel it. And at the end of the scene, after she had died and everyone was mourning her death the way anyone would weep uncontrollably at the death of a child, Jairus would see that Jesus’ healing touch was even more powerful than he had imagined, even more miraculous than he had just witnessed with the hemorrhaging woman. “Do not fear,” Jesus told Jairus, “only believe,” and Jairus did both. When Jesus arrived at the house after the little girl had died, he took her by the hand, touched her, and said, “Little girl, Arise!” In Greek, the verb is the same word used to describe Jesus’ resurrection. Like in Michelangelo’s famous scene of the creation of Adam on the vault of the Sistine Chapel when God stretches out his hand and instills life into Adam, so Jesus’ touch brings life back into this little girl. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus said elsewhere, and his touch contains within it that resurrection, that life, that total restorative power. The miracle of raising this little girl from death to life was meant to show what Jesus wants to do for all of us, in this world and forever.
- The question for you and me is whether in our lives we humbly reach out to touch Jesus with the faith of Jairus and the woman with the 12-year hemorrhage — or do we just “bump into him,” like all those following in the crowd, who, even though they were coming into physical contact with him, were receiving none of his healing and transformative power. When we come to Mass and approach to receive Jesus in Holy Communion do we do so with faith, knowing that we’re touching far more than the hem of his garment, but receiving his whole body, blood, soul and divinity within? Do we recognize we’re receiving the same Jesus whose feet Jairus grasped? Or do we receive him routinely, without awe, without reverence, with hands or souls in need of cleansing? Do we approach Jesus knowing he likewise wants to reach out and touch us, that just like he did with Jairus’ little girl, he wants to lay his hands on us, as he does on the day we’re baptized, as he does in silence in the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, as he does through the raised hands of the priest giving God’s forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance, whereby he who is the resurrection and the life wants us to share in his triumph over sin and death. Do we allow him to transform us in such a way by our contact with him in prayer and in the Sacraments that we can in turn become the hands of his mystical body, burning with his desire to reach out and heal a wounded world in which so many are bleeding, in which so many, including kids, are dying physically and spiritually because they’re not in a life-changing relationship of faith with Him who is the Resurrection, the Way, the Truth and the Life?
- As we prepare on Sunday to act on his words, “Do not fear, just believe,” and proclaim with fervor our Profession of Faith; as we get ready to fall on our knees before him as he enters not Jairus’ house, and not only the house of God, but enters under the roof of each of us and makes us a true temple, let us ask him for the grace to “arise!,” to be raised up to the fullness of life with him, both individually and as a family of faith, that filled with a contagious amazement like all those in Jairus’ house after the miracle, others, in seeing our awe, might hunger to follow us here to where Jesus wants to touch and change them, too. Jesus has indeed rescued us and will rescue us again. He loves us too much to leave us in the pit, hemorrhaging and dead. He’s reaching out to us now. Let us reach back and receive his grace never to leave his restorative embrace!
The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat
to the other side,
a large crowd gathered around him, and he stayed close to the sea.
One of the synagogue officials, named Jairus, came forward.
Seeing him he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, saying,
“My daughter is at the point of death.
Please, come lay your hands on her
that she may get well and live.”
He went off with him,
and a large crowd followed him and pressed upon him.
There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years.
She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors
and had spent all that she had.
Yet she was not helped but only grew worse.
She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd
and touched his cloak.
She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.”
Immediately her flow of blood dried up.
She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.
Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him,
turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?”
But his disciples said to Jesus,
“You see how the crowd is pressing upon you,
and yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
And he looked around to see who had done it.
The woman, realizing what had happened to her,
approached in fear and trembling.
She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth.
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.
Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”
While he was still speaking,
people from the synagogue official’s house arrived and said,
“Your daughter has died; why trouble the teacher any longer?”
Disregarding the message that was reported,
Jesus said to the synagogue official,
“Do not be afraid; just have faith.”
He did not allow anyone to accompany him inside
except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James.
When they arrived at the house of the synagogue official,
he caught sight of a commotion,
people weeping and wailing loudly.
So he went in and said to them,
“Why this commotion and weeping?
The child is not dead but asleep.”
And they ridiculed him.
Then he put them all out.
He took along the child’s father and mother
and those who were with him
and entered the room where the child was.
He took the child by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum,”
which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”
The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around.
At that they were utterly astounded.
He gave strict orders that no one should know this
and said that she should be given something to eat.
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