Tag: leper

Faith Begets Miracles!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Faith, Jesus, spirituality1 Comment

Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
June 30, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/063023.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings offer us a contrast in faith between Genesis’s unconvinced Abraham and Matthew’s expectant leper.

Like any relationship, deepening our friendship with God takes time, attention, patience, and love. In our first reading, Abraham struggles with his part in that deepening. God has been promising Abraham an heir, but almost-centenarian Abraham is impatient to see the incredible promise fulfilled. He basically tells God to forget about “the promise” and just let his illegitimate son Ishmael serve as his heir.

Abraham prostrated himself and laughed as he said to himself,
“Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?
Or can Sarah give birth at ninety?”
Then Abraham said to God,
“Let but Ishmael live on by your favor!”

Genesis 17:17-18

The entire text of Genesis 17 concerns binding Abraham to God in radical faith. Yet by verses 17–18, Abraham completely doubts the promise, laughs a mocking laugh, and appeals to the son already in hand. Abraham, the father of faith, is here again presented as the unfaithful one, unable to trust, and willing to rely on an alternative to the promise.

Walter Brueggemann. Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

When you get right down to it, you really can’t blame Abraham, can you? After all, he is 99 years old! His wife Sarah is 90! It would take a humongous amount of faith to believe that a newborn in going to pop out of this relationship. Right?

Not right.
That transcendent and absolute faith
is exactly what God is asking for
– from Abraham, and from you and me.

Today’s Gospel helps us understand what that kind of faith looks like.

When Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.
And then a leper approached, did him homage, and said,
“Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”

Matthew 8:1-2
  • This unnamed believer’s faith was so great that he trusts the promise without it needing to be spoken. He believes Jesus can heal him.
  • He expresses his relationship to Jesus in reverence and trust. He believes Jesus has divine power.
  • He speaks his need, and let’s it go, knowing that it will be heard.

The leper’s faith immediately releases the mercy in Jesus’s heart.

Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said,
“I will do it. Be made clean.”

Mark 8:3

The passage seems to suggest that God cannot be fully God for us unless we allow it by our faith, worship, and trust. Abraham took a little more time to learn this kind of faith. The leper, perhaps deepened by his long-suffering prayer, came to Jesus already convinced that God fulfills promises. And Christ’s answering healing was immediate.

Poetry: To Be Held – Linda Hogan ( maybe this is all the leper really wanted, or any of us when we pray.)

To be held
by the Light
was what I wanted,
to be a tree drinking the rain,
no longer parched in this hot land.
To be roots in a tunnel growing
but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves
and the green slide of mineral
down the immense distances
into infinite comfort
and the land here, only clay,
still contains and consumes
the thirsty need
the way a tree always shelters the unborn life
waiting for the healing
after the storm
which has been our life.

Music: Loving Touch – Deuter

Heart-Softening

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Courage, Faith, Forgiveness, Gospel, spiritualityLeave a comment

Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
January 12, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/011223.cfm

psalm 95 copy

Today, in Mercy, our first reading quotes at length from Psalm 95, and the message is reprised in the Responsorial Psalm.

Harden not your hearts.

We all know what it feels like to harden our hearts. We do it out of anger, fear, exhaustion, frustration and so many other reasons. We feel like the only way to protect ourselves and our space is to build a wall! Put up those bricks made out of our stony faces, curt words, numbing silence, distancing indifference – our hardened hearts.

Today’s reading tells us that this is never God’s way.

The way to freedom, peace, self-respect, joy and fullness of life is always found in relationship – as God is in relationship with all Creation.

Jesus demonstrates that relationship in today’s Gospel by connecting with the leper. This leper has been walled off from society by illness and disfigurement. Most people’s hearts are hardened against him, but Jesus is “moved by pity” at the leper’s isolation.

The leper, too, has built a bridge by reaching through his own hardened heart in faith and trust. Surely all the years of mistreatment had made him wary of trust, had immobilized him in self-protection. But he allows himself a courageous plea to Jesus, and he is heard.

Jesus Cures a Leper – Rembrandt

It is no easy challenge to soften a hardened heart. Some of our walls are very high, some of our bricks very heavy. But, one by one, we can choose opportunities for forgiveness, kindness, understanding, patience, encouragement, listening and companionship – even, and especially, toward those estranged in any way from us or from themselves. And we can do this even toward ourselves when we have become hardened to our own beauty and goodness.

To begin might take only a smile, a prayer, a phone call, a small kindness, an invitation, a moment of ordinary conversation…. just these might start to crumble a wall, to soften a heart.

Let’s ask God’s grace today to do this heart-softening wherever we might need it. Let’s ask this grace for others in need as well.

Poetry: The Altar by George Herbert – Herbert wrote this poem in the shape of an altar. He describes the spiritual process of allowing his “hard heart” to be built into an altar for God’s praise.

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,

 Made of a heart and cemented with tears:

  Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;

No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same.

                   A HEART alone

                   Is such a stone,

                  As nothing but

                  Thy pow’r doth cut.

                  Wherefore each part

                  Of my hard heart

                  Meets in this frame,

                  To praise thy name:

       That if I chance to hold my peace,

 These stones to praise thee may not cease.

   Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,

     And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

Music: Soften My Heart, Lord (and adding a second song, just because I think you’ll like it.)