4th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
One of the privileges of our life is to be able to sit with someone else and to listen to their story and to hold their struggle to find meaning in their life. Sometimes those people with whom we might sit may have been struggling a long time, and alone. Sometimes they may have given up any struggle, and, rather, given in to the emotional or spiritual impasse they reached many years before. And sometimes they may have only just set out on a deeper search for themselves and for who God might be for them.
Often, of course, we have no word to give, and the silence is hard to bear. On these occasions, we are reminded powerfully that, in the end, the word which truly sets people free comes alone from the Spirit of God who must whisper the word of freedom in people’s hearts in its own way and in its own time.
However, nonetheless, there are moments, after a good deal of listening, when there is an invitation for us to speak. At these times, we realize the power of the spoken word. When said at the right time in the right place in the right way, we recognize the effect that our words can have. Then words can heal; they can communicate life. Words can have a transforming power for other people.
In the scriptural understanding, to speak a word was to release energy – a powerful, personal force that cannot be called back. Creation, itself, is formed and sustained, in Scripture, through a word that is spoken. The prophets spoke words that led people into patterns of conversion. God has become one of us in Jesus who, in his own personality, is the Word that God wishes to speak to us of God’s own self. And that Word is a word of hope, a word of meaning, a word that promises, a word that gives dignity and therefore which sets us free and heals us.
“Only say the word, and we shall be healed,” we say at every Eucharist. It is more than just a liturgical formula. It is a cry from the depths of our own stories. We long with all our being to hear the word which will answer our longing for love, the word which will take away our shame and guilt, the word to affirm us, to reassure us, the word which will set us free. Some of us can spend our whole life looking for and waiting for that word.
The word that we most long to hear is the word that in some way or other says to us that life is worth living – that our life is worth living. For is not this one of the deepest questions with which we struggle: is life for us or against us? The gaze of Jesus holds all these questions which arise out of the human heart struggling. And it is not a large jump to direct the question to him, too: “Are you for us or against us?” Yet, when our cry meets Jesus, it is silenced and transformed, like the cry of the man in the synagogue, albeit not without pain and struggle. Because, before the gaze of Jesus we discover yet another question arising in our hearts – the question, “Is there a love which will understand us and nourish us into our own goodness?”
The answer to the question is given by Jesus’s action. At the very beginning of his ministry, he reaches out to those who are sick and those who are needy – that is, all of us in some way. At the very beginning of his ministry Jesus identifies with our neediness, and fragility. He does not summon us to perfection: he meets us in our limitation. He does not broadcast expectations of integration; he comes to us in our fragmentation.
The first accounts of miracles in the gospels are not meant to illustrate what an extraordinary wonder worker Jesus is. Rather, the stories of miracles of healing at the beginning of the gospel are the writers’ way of expressing where God meets us. All we need to do is to come before him as we are: there is no expectation, no standard set. A love that accepts us, embraces us without condition, not despite our limitations and fragility but precisely in our vulnerability, is a love which frees, which liberates, which saves us from the self-destruction fuelled by our own self-rejection
Herein lies the authority of Jesus. However, it is not the authority of tyranny, it is the authority of companionship. It is not the authority of omnipotence; it is the authority of a vulnerability that is shared and transformed into hospitality. Jesus speaks, and his word makes a difference.
But can we ourselves also look for ordinary ways to speak that word of strength and hope to others? Believing that Jesus’ own words have power to change, should challenges us to ask how we ourselves use words, not just at the special unique times, but in life, generally. Do we use words in a way that brings strength to others, to lead them more into trust, to bring them healing because they are words of nurturance and forgiveness? Or do we use words to put others down? Instead of empowering others, do our words tend towards disrespect?
This is the authority we, too, have to offer those we are with. Indeed, in the end, it is the only authority we carry. Let us be ever generous with this authority we have in his name.
