Not
long after I was ordained, I was working as a hospital chaplain. 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
earthly 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: To sacrifice
himself for us for the forgiveness of sins, so that we might have
eternal life with God when we die. Second, to show us that God is
with us in our sufferings. Jesus freely accepting death on a
cross showed us this.Third, 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 to. During our
time on earth God is gradually transforming us and helping us to
become the best version of ourselves that we can be. 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. Jesus 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 we get too focused on
the world around us, we will miss what our life is really about.
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 taught us about it. 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 evil. 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 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.
Often
at funerals I hear people speaking about the person who has died as
if they are gone forever, their existence extinguished, nothing else.
But to see it that way is to completely miss the point of what our
faith teaches us. What Jesus has taught us is that while we are on
earth we are all the time preparing for the world to come, something
which is unimaginably wonderful. If we really believe that then we
can quietly be happy for those who have gone before us, because they
have already reached it, at least if they have chosen it by the way
they live. We too have to choose it by the way we live. However,
knowing that something wonderful awaits us should give us both a
comfort and a hope for those who have died. Sooner or later we will
also be there. For now we do our best to try and live as best we can,
to continually choose good over evil and to live as God asks us to.
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.
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