"Do not be afraid; just have faith." "Your faith has saved you." Woody Allen in a reflective mood once said, "More than at any other time in history humanity is at a crossroads; one road leads to hopelessness and despair; the other leads to total extinction. Choose wisely." Well, he got part of it right. We are always at a crossroads and we must choose wisely, but our gospel situates our crossroads at quite a different place. The author of Wisdom and St. Mark address the most fundamental of human situations: fear and suffering and death. Are they cause for hopelessness and despair or for healing and faith?
Wisdom tells us that all creatures of the earth are wholesome and God has created each of us in God's own sacred image to share fully in God's eternal life. At the end of the first creation narrative the author of Genesis has God look out over the work of creation and pronounce it all very good. God didn't leave anything out and our trust in the perfection of God's handiwork empowers us to be free of every fear. It is this other hopeful crossroads that Jairus and the ailing woman dramatize for us. Twelve long years of a debilitating illness, all her resources exhausted, the unnamed woman stumbles through the passing crowd. Mad with worry, helpless to save his little daughter, the synagogue leader shuffles toward the teacher. They meet at the crossroads of healing and hope, of freedom and of life. "Do not be afraid; just have faith." "Your faith has saved you." All three of our synoptic gospels present this double miracle. It speaks to the faith experience of their own varied communities and to our own experience. We've all been to that crossroads of fear and helplessness with Jairus and the woman, unable to change a situation or undo a mistake or solve a problem. If I could only reach out and touch the Lord, if only the Lord would take me by the hand. Sometime ago I visited the grotto of Our Lady at Emmittsburg. There is an altar there with the inscription: "Where there is faith, there is no need of explanations. Where there is no faith, explanations make no difference." Our gospel story today calls us to the crossroads of faith to reach out to our healing Lord, to allow him to take our hands and lift us up. Someone remarked that Jesus came to save people, not to win arguments. That's how he comes to us today, in word and sacrament, to offer us the faith that brings salvation and healing and peace. Father John Deeney will turn 88 this month. John has been an evangelist for over fifty years. He has translated the scriptures and all of our liturgical books into the Ho tribal language and has published a unique study of Ho culture and customs in Ho. Since Ho had never been written down before, he took great pains to choose the exact word to communicate the meaning he wanted. He was puzzling over an accurate way to express the concept of faith and at the end of a long day sat down to read his breviary. He put his feet up and said, "This is it. Faith is like a comfortable chair in which you can lean your whole weight when exhausted and know that God will uplift you." John Ciani was a forty-year-old Jesuit priest from New York who had just finished his doctoral studies at UVA in American Catholic Church history. He was on tenure track at Georgetown University and regularly published scholarly articles in his field and pastoral reflections in America magazine. He was a popular preacher at Holy Trinity and a terrific Italian cook. John was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and after eight months of aggressive treatment was about to die. I had been visiting him at Georgetown Hospital and in the Jesuit Infirmary. The last time I saw him we spoke for a long while about his family and friends. We celebrated all the sacraments together and as I was leaving he asked me, "Do I have everything I need?" I told him, "Yes, John, you have everything you need." He died that night. I was privileged to be with him at the crossroads of faith, as he waited for the outstretched hand of the Lord to lift him up. He had never visited India, but he would have understood John Deeney's idea of resting his whole weight when exhausted in the confidence that God would uplift him. He had everything he needed. He chose very wisely indeed. The Church calls each of us to the crossroads of faith this morning, with our hopes and dreams, our fears and anxieties. We reach out in faith to the Lord who is surely present with us, knowing that he will take our hand and walk through the day with us. Choose wisely. Faith is not like holding your breath under water or figuring out a riddle. True faith gives you the trust to rest your whole weight on the Lord in the confidence that the Lord in love will uplift you. There's nothing, nothing at all to be afraid of. Just have faith, the kind of faith that always saves.
This page was updated June 2009