13th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2012 

Jesus commended the haemorrhaging woman with: Your faith has restored you to health.  He challenged the synagogue official, distraught over the news of his daughter's death: Do not be afraid; only have faith.  Mark connected the two incidents because he saw both characters symbolizing the extremes of the community: those at the bottom and those at the top of the social and religious system.  Their respective healings symbolized the wholeness that Jesus wished to bring to every level of Jewish society.  Only have faith.  Jesus wasn't referring to the accuracy of what they believed about him but to their capacity and readiness to trust him, to entrust themselves to him.

Church leaders today talk about the crisis of faith in Western culture.  Depending on how they envisage faith, some see the solution to this crisis in what they have come to call "The New Evangelisation".  Go out and teach the basics – be clear, be forceful.  Undoubtedly, there is a place for that.  But who will listen?  Indeed, who will go further and respond with commitment?  We can all be challenged on that score – those outside the Church, but also those of us within it.  As I read the Gospel, I see Jesus challenging to commitment – challenging people to trust him, and his way of non-violent love and of universal outreach.

Might the religious crisis confronting the modern Western world reduce to a question of people's ability and readiness to trust and to commit themselves? … to commit themselves not only to a religious lifestyle, but virtually to anything, certainly, to anything transcendent?  Have we in our Western world lost our nerve?  Have we opted for security and familiarity, for abundance, and limitless information and distraction instead?  Lacking trust to move beyond what we think we can control, we confine our attention to our kitchens and our home improvements?

Perhaps we have reason no longer to trust many of our institutions: the press, the banking industry, the parliamentary process, Trade Unions, the police, and, not least, the Church.  Perhaps for some, their betrayed trust in certain individual persons has left them badly bruised.

We need somehow to find balance between naively giving trust and fearfully withholding trust.  If we won't trust, we won't commit.  If we won't commit,  we can never mature and become whole.  I find Jesus' comment to the synagogue official quite relevant: Do not be afraid; only have faith.  We fear surrender in faith and trust.  It takes courage.  It also takes wisdom to sense whom we can trust.  Both – courage and wisdom - are hard to cultivate.  But if we don't cultivate them, we shall never become whole … never, really, surrender - even to God.

Perhaps, we can be helped, and also help others, to become increasingly trusting and trustworthy.  I remember, early on in my priesthood, celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation with a young girl in grade five or six.  I can still see her today calmly looking me straight in the eye with total trust.  Her trust had a profound effect on me.  It became an inescapable incentive to become ever more trustworthy.

We need each other.  We all need others to trust us if we are to grow trustworthy.  Others need us to trust them if they are to become trustworthy.  We all need wisdom and discernment.  We all need courage.  We shall make mistakes.  Our trust will be betrayed.  But if we are trusted enough by enough others, we can live with betrayal and move beyond.  

Your faith has restored you to health.