13th Sunday Year B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2024

St Mark’s Gospel today has presented us with two contrasting women. The first was a young woman, twelve years of age, poised on the threshold of adult life, privileged daughter of the respected ruler of the local synagogue, himself typical of the culturally entitled Jewish religious elite. The girl was desperately sick and close to death — symbolic, perhaps, in Jesus’ mind, of the state of the Jewish religious institution as a whole. When confronted with her eventual death, Jesus asked of the father, “Do not be afraid. Only have faith.”

The other woman was an adult, but pushed to the edges of society — poor, exploited by the professionals, cruelly ostracised by everyone as ritually impure due to her chronic haemorrhaging over a period of twelve years, yet uniquely addressed by Jesus as “daughter” and commended for the depth of her personal faith in him. She was an excellent illustration of the first few beatitudes: “Blessed are you who are poor; the Kingdom of heaven is yours.”

Jesus healed the older woman, facilitated by her faith. The younger one he brought back to life — an anticipation of the power soon to released by his own death and eventual resurrection.

In the Gospels we read of numerous healings worked by Jesus, particularly in the early stage of his mission around Galilee — to illustrate the closeness of the Kingdom of God. But in Jesus' own mind, the experience of the Kingdom also depended on people’s free changing of lifestyle, the relinquishing of their innate hostilities and their deliberate choice of his way of mutual respect and non-violence.

Though many were healed, there still remained many Galileans who were not.

In our own day we hear of occasional healings worked through prayer, and no doubt there are many that we do not hear about. Yet people still get ill and die - some peacefully, some tragically.

I have a friend, a former priest, who left the priesthood many years ago and has come to lose faith now in God. The reason for his loss of faith is the rampant presence in our world of evil and tragedy, illness and death. There are lots of others who still hang on to their faith, but cannot understand how God can consistently allow so much evil.


Have most of us wondered at times: Why me? Why doesn’t God? Why didn’t God …? Questions like that can be hard, perhaps impossible, to answer satisfactorily. Jesus himself on the cross questioned his Father, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

It is difficult to think straight while we are grieving. While people are grieving, their need is not cold logic but warm understanding and practical support. And grieving can last a long time. In itself, it is precious, even sacred. People need to grieve, to lament — even when doing so is painful. And when communities have been hurt, they need to grieve and to lament together.

If you read the Hebrew Psalms, you find that so many of them are expressions of grief, even of anger. And they are addressed to God! And sometimes, when you come to the end of a psalm, you find that the anger has become a beautiful act of trust in God. Their change of mood is not inconsistent. Mood is not thought; it is feeling. And feelings have lives of their own.