A Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Job 7:1-4, 6-7 1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23 Mark 1:29-39
Here is a well-written story that I do not like. I do not like it because it is about suffering.
Most people know the actor Patrick Stewart as the intrepid captain of the Starship Enterprise, from the Star Trek franchise, “The Next Generation.” His recent autobiography, Making It So (2023), shares this story from Stewart’s childhood in the poverty of rural Yorkshire in northern England. It is to his credit as a writer that the story distresses me. Perhaps you as well.
One day, something happened at t’bottom field that left me shaken. A few of us had been kicking a ball around when I spotted a squirrel darting up the branch of a tree. We all stopped and stood in wonder, observing this creature with delight, because squirrels were rare where we lived. Then there was a shout from an older boy who was walking toward us. He wanted to know what we were looking at, and we pointed to the little creature in the tree. It was then that I saw he was carrying an air rifle, which he lifted and pointed. I yelled “No!” but it was too late—he had pulled the trigger. The squirrel was hit and began sliding down the tree’s trunk. It dug its claws into the bark and temporarily broke its fall. But it couldn’t hold on. Scratching desperately at the trunk, it slipped farther and farther down, until it fell with a gentle thump onto the grass and lay still.
I react to this story as I do to those animal abuse commercials on television, the ones the singer Sarah McLachlan narrates. One image of a suffering animal follows another. I do not want to see this. I do not want to think about it, even if I should.
I ask myself why the suffering of animals bothers me so greatly when I am in the presence of human suffering almost daily. How is it that I find the latter easier to bear? If you do as well, is there something wrong with us?
Maybe this is the issue: Physical suffering is something that we can see, and we can immediately translate it, however imperfectly, into something that we have experienced. We know what an overwhelming pain in the chest feels like. We know what it means to recoil in terror.
But when another human being is in a hospital bed, all that I can do—with limited accuracy—is to imagine the physical pain. I cannot truly recreate all the spiritual and psychological trauma that comes with sickness.
It is a challenge even to adumbrate the contours of spiritual suffering:
• Why has this happened? Am I to blame for this?
• Will this pass? Or is this how it is going to be?
• Will this worsen? What will I do if it does?
• Who is tending my corner of the world? Who is caring for my loved ones?
• Will I ever regain the life that I had?
• How much of my life, my dreams, will this illness take?
The physical pain that we share with other animals is something that we can grasp, but the spiritual, psychic pain of illness exceeds us. It is too great for us to conceive even for ourselves, much less comprehend in another. Only the artistic genius can even hope to depict this.
Most of us do not live beyond the reach of modern medicine, and what it cannot remove, it can at least relieve. It can lessen physical suffering. But who or what can deliver us from the spiritual suffering of serious illness?
This is the question St. Mark addresses. In his Gospel, the identity of Jesus becomes clear through a series of denials and demonstrations. Denials: Jesus will not answer clearly if he is the Messiah. Why? Because he rejects the many false expectations that come with the claim. Instead, demonstrations: He appears among us as one who heals, who casts out demons, who rules nature itself, who feeds the multitude.
Jesus heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. As a result,
When it was evening, after sunset,
they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door.
He cured many who were sick with various diseases,
and he drove out many demons,
not permitting them to speak because they knew him (Mk 1:32-34).
Try to imagine what that day must have been like. And then,
Rising very early before dawn, he left
and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed (1:35).
His disciples pursued him. “Everyone is looking for you” (1:37). But Jesus has not come to heal physical maladies. He has come to heal much more than the afflictions to which all nature is subject. For a time, he heals these but only to manifest his real purpose, his true identity. He is God’s presence among us. He is the hope, the radical future, in whom we are to trust.
He tells his disciples:
Let us go on to the nearby villages
that I may preach there also.
For this purpose have I come (1:38).
Christ is a preacher, not a physician. The latter we can master well enough, and we are not—never were—meant to conquer physical death itself. It is death’s assault upon the soul that we need not fear, and it is the preacher—the one who knows something that eludes us—whom we must hear, who can truly minister to spiritual suffering.
Patrick Stewart concludes his tale:
I turned and ran frantically away from the scene, over the wall and up Camm Lane to our house. Crashing through the door, I encountered my mam, just home from the mill, looking at me with alarm. I threw my arms round her and howled. Eventually, after I’d calmed down a bit, I told her what I had witnessed. It was the first time I had ever seen a living creature die. Mam held me tight and calmed me, wiping away my tears.
That is who Christ is, the one who can hold us tight and wipe away the tears.
