In the first couple of years of my ministry I remember coming across
a young girl of about 12 who was very sick. She was in the
hospital several times and she eventually died. I can still see her
pale dead body in the intensive care room and her poor parents who were
completely devastated. I remember feeling so helpless as a
chaplain. I have often prayed for them since. Every time I read today's Gospel I think of that little girl and her parents.
An event
like that always brings up the most difficult questions. Why
does God allow these things to happen? Why didn’t God heal
her? The readings today give us some interesting things to think about in
regard to this. First of all death was not something that God
wanted for us. And although it is now a part of our existence,
it is only a stage of transformation; a doorway to another stage of
our life with God.
The way that Jesus dealt with sickness and death also has a lot to
teach us. Since Jesus was able to heal people and even bring
people back from the dead, as he did on a few occasions, why did he
always want people to be quiet about it? In this Gospel he only
brought three of his disciples with him and when he got to the house
he made as if the girl was not dead at all. Then he asked the
family to keep the whole event quiet. Why? You would
think that it would be in his favour if people knew and that He would
have more respect and that people would listen to him. Perhaps
it was because his primary role was not about healing people
physically, even though he had great compassion for people who were
sick. However, his main role involved three things:
·
First to offer himself for us, so
that we might have eternal life with God when we die.
·
Secondly, to show us that God is
with us in our sufferings. Jesus’ freely accepting death on a
cross showed us this.
·
Thirdly, to teach us about God and
what our life is all about.
Jesus wanted to teach us that God is not interested in condemning us,
or ‘catching us out,’ rather that God has made us to be with him
and that God will make that happen if we allow him. During our life
here God is gradually transforming us and helping us to become the best people we can be, at least if we are open to it. The teachings that Jesus left us with are the path which leads us
through this gradual transformation, so that we become more like God
all the time. He is saying, ‘If you want to be transformed
inside, then live the way that I am showing you. Spend your
life loving and serving the people around you. Don’t always
put yourself first and don’t spend your whole life trying to store
up a wealth that will disappear the day you die. If you get too
focused on the world around you, you will miss what your life is
really about.’
Now I know that it is tempting to think that that kind of life is
only for a few people and that our own life is too difficult or too
demanding to be like that; but that is not true. If it was not
possible to live this way of life, then Jesus would not have given it
to us. The truth is that all of us are given endless
opportunities to live the way Jesus taught us, because we are all the
time being faced with difficult situations where we continually have
to make a choice for good or bad. All of these choices are
shaping us and making us into better or worse people. The good
thing is that even if we have made a mess of many of the choices
we’ve been given, God keeps giving us plenty more, because God
wants us to grow into the kind of people that He knows we can
become. It is the ordinary struggles that we are faced with
every day which are shaping us.
God created us for life, to become beautiful, to become more and more
like him, until eventually we leave this world and are united to him
for always. That is our journey, but how we live it is up to
us.
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