Touching Jesus in the Eucharist With Faith, Thirteenth Sunday (B), June 30, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Cathedral of St. Joseph, Columbus, Ohio
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
June 30, 2024
Wis 1:13-15.2:23-24, Ps 30, 2 Cor 8:7.9.13-15, Mk 5:21-43

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below. The first 6:33 is in Spanish and the rest in English. 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Dear brothers and Sisters, my name is Father Roger Landry. I’m chaplain for the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. I’m so grateful to Bishop Earl Fernandes for his very warm welcome to me and to my fellow pilgrims to the Diocese of Columbus and for his very generous invitation to preach at this Sunday Mass in the mother Church of the Diocese. Today is the 44^th day of our 65 day, 1200 mile journey that I am making with my fellow pilgrims from the Atlantic Ocean in New Haven, Connecticut, to Indianapolis, Indiana, for the upcoming National Eucharistic Congress. Our Catholic life is meant to be a pilgrimage in which we follow the Lord Jesus, our Good Shepherd, as he seeks to lead us through the dark valleys and high mountains of life to the eternal verdant pastures where he has prepared a banquet for us. Jesus does not want us to remain static, but he always says to us, first, “Come,” and then “Follow me,” and finally “Go and proclaim the Gospel to every person. Our faith is fundamentally dynamic. St. John the Evangelist summarizes the Christian life as “walking just as Jesus walked.” And so we are all pilgrims in the pilgrim Church on earth and Jesus accompanies us each day in the Holy Eucharist. In today’s Gospel we see a glimpse of the journey Jesus wants to make with us. Jairus, the synagogue official, makes a difficult journey to Jesus to ask him for a miracle on behalf of his daughter. Because Jesus was unpopular in the synagogue of Capernaum, Jairus’ action was dangerous. He could have lost his job. But he loved his daughter enough to risk everything. Then Jesus began a journey with Jairus to his home, which was not merely a physical journey in the midst of a crowd, but it was also a journey of faith, in which Jairus was asked to continue to trust even after his daughter had died. But Jairus made that journey with Jesus and his faith was rewarded.
• We also see in the Gospel the desperate pilgrimage of the woman who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years. Her journey was made on the ground, as she slithered through the crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ tunic. Hers, too, was a journey of faith, confident that if she merely came into contact with something Jesus was wearing she would receive a great miracle. Jesus likewise journeyed with her. He stopped walking to Jairus’ house, despite the urgency of the situation with Jairus’ daughter, to be able to bring this woman into the light, so that she would be able to advance in her journey of faith, not only with Jesus, but with others from whom she was cut off because of being ritually impure. Jesus likewise wants to stop to meet each of us, in order to help us grow in faith, too. He wants to heal us. He wants to raise us to the fullness of life in this world. And he does so in the Holy Eucharist.
• Today at this Mass, as we prepare to make a Eucharistic procession in downtown Columbus, we pray that all of us may do more than merely bump into Jesus or gaze on him with physical eyes, but journey to and with him with the faith of Jesus and this anonymous, bleeding woman. We pray, too, for all those who will encounter Jesus with us along the way, that they, seeing our faith, might come to be touched by Jesus, receive healing, be restored to life, and come to join us on the pilgrimage of earthly life with the Eucharistic Jesus, as he seeks to lead us to the eternal embrace of God the Father in heaven. Jesus has come to Mass to touch us even more powerfully than he touched the girl and woman in the Gospel. Let us open ourselves now to the full power of this Eucharistic miracle of love so that we may learn from the inside how to walk just as Jesus walked as we walk with him today in Columbus.]
• [Queridos hermanos y hermanas, me llamo Padre Roger Landry. Soy capellán de la Ruta de Santa Isabel Seton de la Peregrinación Eucarística Nacional. Hoy es el día 44 de nuestro viaje de 65 días y 1200 millas que estoy haciendo con mis compañeros peregrinos desde el Océano Atlántico en New Haven, Connecticut, hasta Indianápolis, Indiana, para el próximo Congreso Eucarístico Nacional.
• Nuestra vida católica debe ser una peregrinación en que siguemos al Señor Jesús, nuestro Buen Pastor, mientras él busca guiarnos a través de los valles oscuros y las altas montañas de la vida hacia los verdes pastos eternos donde El ha preparado un banquete para nosotros. Jesús no quiere que nos quedemos estáticos, pero siempre nos dice primero “Vengan,” luego “Síganme” y finalmente “Vayan y anuncien el Evangelio a todos.” Nuestra fe es fundamentalmente dinámica. San Juan Evangelista resume la vida cristiana en “caminar como caminó Jesús.” Por eso todos somos peregrinos en la Iglesia peregrina en la tierra y Jesús nos acompaña cada día en la Sagrada Eucaristía.
• En el Evangelio de hoy vislumbramos el camino que Jesús quiere hacer con nosotros. Jairo, el funcionario de la sinagoga, hace un difícil viaje hacia Jesús para pedirle un milagro en favor de su hija. Como Jesús era ya may impopular en la sinagoga de Cafarnaúm, la acción de Jairo fue peligrosa. Podría haber perdido su trabajo. Pero amaba a su hija tanto para arriesgar tudo. Luego Jesús comenzó un viaje con Jairo hacia su casa, que no fue simplemente un viaje físico en medio de una multitud, sino también un viaje de fe, en el que se le pidió a Jairo que continuara confiando incluso después de la muerte de su hija. Pero Jairo hizo ese viaje con Jesús y su fe seria recompensada.
• Vemos también en el Evangelio la peregrinación desesperada de la mujer que padecía una hemorragia desde hacía doce años. Su viaje lo hizo en el suelo, mientras se deslizaba entre la multitud para tocar el borde de la túnica de Jesús. El suyo también fue un camino de fe, confiada en que si simplemente entraba en contacto con algo Jesús se vestía, recibiría un gran milagro. Jesús también viajó con ella. Dejó de caminar hacia la casa de Jairo, a pesar de la urgencia de la situación con la hija de Jairo, para poder traer a la luz a esta mujer, para que pudiera avanzar en su camino de fe, no solo con Jesús, sino con los otros de quienes estaba separada por ser ritualmente impura. Jesús también quiere detenerse a encontrarse con cada uno de nosotros, para ayudarnos a crecer también en la fe. Él quiere sanarnos. Él quiere elevarnos a la plenitud de la vida en este mundo. Y lo hace en la Sagrada Eucaristía.
• Hoy en esta Misa, mientras nos preparamos para hacer una procesión eucarística en el centro de Columbus, oramos para que todos nosotros podamos hacer más que simplemente toparnos con Jesús o mirarlo con ojos físicos, sino viajar hacia y con él con la fe de Jairo y esta mujer anónima y sangrante. También oramos por todos aquellos que encontrarán a Jesús con nosotros en el camino, para que, al ver nuestra fe, puedan ser tocados por Jesús, recibir sanidad, ser restaurados a la vida plena de fe y venir a unirse a nosotros en la peregrinación de vida terrenal con Jesús Eucarístico, mientras él busca llevarnos al abrazo eterno de Dios Padre en el cielo.
• Jesús ha venido a esta Misa para tocarnos aún más poderosamente de lo que tocó a la niña y a la mujer en el Evangelio. Abrámonos ahora al pleno poder de este milagro eucarístico de amor, para que podamos aprender desde dentro cómo caminar tal como Jesús caminó, como caminamos con él hoy en Columbus.]
• In the ongoing Eucharistic Revival of the Catholic Church in the United States, the most important outcome is for us not just to recognize that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ — the same Jesus who was in Mary’s womb for nine months, whom St. Joseph held in his strong arms, who died on Calvary for us, rose from the dead on the third day and ascended to heaven 40 days later — but to treat Jesus the way Mary and Joseph treated him, the way the disciples and apostles treated him, the way the saints throughout the centuries have treated him. We Catholics firmly believe and forthrightly profess that the Eucharist is not a thing, the Eucharist is not bread and wine, but is in fact the eternal Son of God, the Savior of the World, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He just looks different than he did in ancient Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, humbly present for us under double miracle of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity and the retention of the appearances of bread and wine so that we won’t be repulsed when we consume him. The question is how do we in fact treat Jesus? Do we approach him with faith and awe? Do we draw close to him with love, hope and gratitude?
• In the second reading, St. Paul tells us that that Jesus, even though he was rich, made himself poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich. This truth obviously applies to the way that the Son of God took on our humanity so that we might share in his divinity. It applies to the way he was stripped of everything and killed on Calvary so that we might participate in his triumph over sin and death in his resurrection. To anticipate the Gospel he came to hemorrhage his blood on Calvary, to enter into our pain, our shame, our embarrassment even as we see in the healing of Jairus’s daughter into our death and resurrection. He, God, came to share radically in our death so that he might do for all of us something even greater than he did for her, not just resuscitating us to die again later, but raising us to eternal life. This incredible solidarity applies most of all to the way Jesus is with us in the Eucharist. As St. Thomas Aquinas told us in his beautiful Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote, on the Cross his divinity was hidden, but in the Eucharist even his humanity is hidden; Jesus impoverished himself in this way so that he might unite us to his risen life even now, so that he might fill us with his joy, so that he might enrich us as we receive him as the world’s greatest treasure.
• Today’s dramatic Gospel scene helps us to see the faith with which two different people in need approached Jesus 2000 years ago, which can place a mirror before us about how we, too, draw close to Jesus today. The healing of the woman with the hemorrhage in today’s Gospel is one of the literally most touching of all Jesus’ miracles. 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 no doubt bumping into Jesus 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 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 as if an ambulance driver speeding to attend to a 911 call all of a sudden heard a faint, friendly tap of the horn and 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 or the temple. 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 happened 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 someone who was already highly suspect in their eyes and was no longer even welcome in their synagogue. He loved his daughter too much to care about his career. With fatherly abandon, he ran up to Jesus, threw himself humbly and plaintively at his feet, and, as St. Mark says, begged Jesus repeatedly to come to 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 for arise comes from 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. As the Book of Wisdom tells us in the first reading, “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. … For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to [the devil’s] company experience it.” Jesus came to give us a triumph over the devil. As we prayed in the Psalm, he came to rescue us so that our infernal enemies wouldn’t rejoice over us and so that he could change our mourning into dancing. As we pondered in the epistle, even though he was rich, he became poor, spending himself for us totally down to the last drop of his own effusion of blood, so that by his poverty we might become rich. Jesus came to bring to fulfillment in your life and mine what the miracles in the Gospel point to.
• The question for you and me is whether in our lives we humbly reach out to touch Jesus in the Eucharist 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. Today many in our society, including many Catholics, have lost touch with Jesus and his healing power in the sacraments and prayer. Some Catholics live and come to Church almost as non-Catholics, without conviction in Jesus’ Real Presence. 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? That he can work miracles for us just like the two he worked in the Gospel? On Friday the Eucharistic pilgrimage stopped at Mother Angeline McCrory Manor for a processing with the nursing home and then a holy hour. As part of the Holy Hour, during which we focused on how in the presentation in the Temple Saints Simeon and Anna had touched the baby Jesus, I had the privilege to bring Jesus individually to all those present. They touched the monstrance, many kissed it, and they were touched by Jesus.  Many were weeping uncontrollably. It was very moving. The same Jesus who walked through Capernaum, who walked through Mother Angeline Manor, comes here to St. Joseph Cathedral today for you, to touch you and me, and not just on the outside. He comes to touch us on the inside. But are we going to touch him with true faith, knowing he can cure us of our inner wounds, knowing he can raise from the dead whatever in us is lifeless? Will we receive him with awe and reverence? Will we draw close, knowing the depth at which he wants to reach out and touch us? Just like he did with Jairus’ little girl, so he wants to lay his hands on us, as he did on the day we were 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, and as he does within, as we become for a time like a tabernacle in which the King of Kings makes his abode. Will we allow him to transform us in such a way by our contact with him in prayerful adoration so 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 little girls like Jairus’ daughter, 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?
• Every Mass is meant to be a sacred encounter with God in which he touches us at the greatest depth of our body and soul and seeks to bring us into greater communion with him. But for this dramatic transformation to occur, we need to believe in him, in his teaching, in his love, in his power. He tells us, as he told Jairus, “Do not fear, just believe.” We prepare to do so as we proclaim with fervor our Profession of Faith, as we get ready to fall on our knees before him as he enters not Jairus’ house, but comes under the roof of each of us and makes us a true temple. Today we beg him for the grace to “arise!,” to be raised up to the fullness of life with him, and with us the whole Church, so 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 the Eucharistic Jesus wants to touch and change them, too.

The readings for the Mass were: 

For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor,
so that by his poverty you might become rich.
Not that others should have relief while you are burdened,
but that as a matter of equality
your abundance at the present time should supply their needs,
so that their abundance may also supply your needs,
that there may be equality.
As it is written:
Whoever had much did not have more,
and whoever had little did not have less.

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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