Today’s readings: Job 7, 1-4.6-7; 1 Corinthians 9, 16-19.22-23; Mark 1, 29-39
With almost 26 million active COVID cases and well over two million deaths, we cannot just move on with our comfortable lives in the shadow of this disaster. It is a scenario that should make us think seriously about our beliefs and about what our proclamation of the Gospel is bringing to the world in havoc. In today’s letter to the Corinthians, St Paul says “woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel”. But what Gospel are we preaching?
The Gospel should help us look misery in the face and commit ourselves in solidarity with the afflicted. Our preaching normally addresses comfortably listening audiences, but should instead reach out to the margins of society; it has to be balm to the wounds of many, it has to touch the hurts people carry inside, it has to uncover the lies we make ourselves believe about how things are going.
Since the beginning of his ministry, Pope Francis has been proposing as a working model for the Church that of a ‘field-hospital’, which is light-years distant from the models we were used to up to mid-20th century when the Church perceived itself as separate from and parallel to society. Today’s gospel reading is an iconic depiction of what a field-hospital means. Jesus’s concern is not the salvation of souls, he immerses himself in the crowd, attending to the people’s wounds and predicaments.
When people are afflicted, they are existentially shaken and yearn for healing, hope and solace. This is the feeling that dominates in the present circumstances we are living in, in spite of the aura of omnipotence that at times seemed to transpire from a culture so highly technologised and digital. If for us believers the backdrop of all that exists is God the loving creator, how can we explain so much suffering? Who is this God, all-powerful and yet so indifferent to an ailing humanity? Why is He so tolerant, almost impotent, in the face of abuse, violence, wars and race-conflicts? Why is His absence so conspicuous?
The reading from the Book of Job today sounds depressing, but it is in no way alien to our modern experience. In the face of disaster, Job lost everything, but in spite of his holding on to faith in God, when life was unbearable he turned to a philosophy of life that sounds nihilistic. He was pressured to give in and do what human reason would dictate in such circumstances. The questions that weighed down on his mind and heart are the perennial questions that never die.
I dare say that not even in the Bible can we find an answer to these questions. In today’s gospel from St Mark, Jesus is not the theologian or the philosopher pontificating from a podium and trying to explain the unexplainable. In a field-hospital what people yearn for is for someone to touch their wounds and attend to their hurts. And that is precisely what Jesus does.
With the “whole town crowding round the door, he cures many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another”. Our planet is overcrowded with people suffering from abuse and violence, losing their jobs, going below the poverty line and feeling simply disposable. Faith in God has to be rediscovered as healing and liberating, otherwise there is no sense at all in believing. Jesus addresses the person in its wholeness because God created us to be happy even in this world.
Our faith, like that of Job, needs to be shaken. It is then that, hand in hand with our human fragility and emptied of our logical explanations, our heart in affliction can be truly desirous of going beyond its limitations and reaching out to the loving God.