Reflection on the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

As many of you know my niece, Dominica, and her husband, Fernando, were in a catastrophic car accident in mid-July.  Both were injured.  Fernando suffered massive head trauma and serious brain damage, was resuscitated at the scene, and has been in a vegetative state from which he is only slowly beginning to emerge — the prognosis for significant recovery remains limited.

He has been unable to respond meaningfully to sound, or to speak, to communicate, to interact in any consistent meaningful way with his environment or the people around him. Not even to his wife, his children, my sister, who have been gathered around him hoping and praying for and expecting a miracle, literally for his tongue to be loosed and his ears opened. For healing. For awareness, like the man in today’s Gospel, he was deaf and mute, brought to Jesus for healing.

This family reality gives a poignancy to today’s Gospel from Mark. It has been the inescapable background for my thinking about this Gospel. About miracles. A bias that refuses to leave my head.  My thoughts and prayers for Fernando are near constant and refuse to quiet.

My sister and niece long for a Jesus who would come by, put his fingers in Fernando’s ears, groan to heaven, spit on his tongue and return him to his family healed. My own professional training and experience tells me that any recovery will be a long and slow battle with limited results. My faith tells me that miracles do happen and at the same time that our lives are wrapped in the Paschal Mystery of which death, pain and suffering, and sometimes the seeming absence of God are a part.

Jesus had a reputation as a faith healer, and doubtless some of the crowd that followed him were there out of curiosity — out of a hope of seeing a miracle. Experiencing one in someone they loved. Some saw the healing at his hands as a sign – that Jesus would emerge as the promised savior overturning Roman occupation. We heard a few weeks ago that many of the people who had been following Jesus left his side and went home, back to their lives before Jesus. They found Jesus’ teachings, the demands of discipleship, too hard. They wanted a miracle but not pain and suffering. They wanted life easier, not more of a challenge. I get that. I do.

My sister was sure there would be a miracle — that suddenly — miraculously Fernando would wake up.  First, when he was past eight8 hours of brain surgery, then when the bleeding in his brain had stopped, then when the brain swelling went down, when more people started praying. Now they struggle with the reality that he may not fully recover, may never speak or see normally or communicate well. He might not walk much less leap like a stag. And he may need constant care for the rest of his life. They, their family, will need to provide that care. So the question becomes do they, in the absence of the miracle they expected, the hardness of what life has become, go forward in hope — in a faith that continues to believe that the promises of an all good and compassionate God are kept. Or do they, too, leave.

Where does it all leave me as I sit with these readings? As I sit with my family’s pain heavy on my heart? Where does it leave any of us as we sit with the pain of the world that is crushingly real and so heavy on our hearts? As we watch the horror of Gaza, live into an increasing climate crisis, the collapse of social order? War, violence, disaster after disaster. Do we dare live on in faith?

Is the goodness of God, God’s mercy and compassion wrapped up somehow, not only in the miraculous healing that Mark recounts, but also in the miracles that didn’t happen? That don’t happen. Or is it all just tragic. Has Fernando’s life, like so many others, been reduced to tragedy?

The first reading today, from the prophet Isaiah, speaks to those who are frightened — for whom the future is literally terrifying. Overwhelming.  It speaks of the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the dumb speaking, the lame leaping like the stag. But it does not promise a sure fix. It doesn’t promise that bombs won’t fall or that life-changing accidents won’t happen. It looks forward to healing not so much in the immediate present but in a future — possibly a far distant future — a future where God’s kingdom is established, present and recognized and celebrated. A kingdom coming in Jesus but not yet come in us or the reality in which we live. What God promises is not so much the stag leaping for joy but the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, strong with peace and justice, healing and wholeness, forgiveness and reconciliation. Mercy. A kingdom rooted in our hearts, in the love we live for one another.

What we see in the first reading is reflected in the Gospel, in Jesus. Jesus is what God looks like in human form. What Jesus is about is God’s presence faithfully with us, God’s compassion, God’s mercy.  God’s care for those frightened by life. Those injured by life. Those who suffer. What God looks like in Jesus is wrapped both in miracles and in pain and brutal suffering and in the reality of resurrection and fulfillment.  

Several weeks ago we heard Joe Chinnici speak of the Eucharist that we share at this table as a little taste, a tiny bite, of what is unfolding in God’s dream for creation, for the whole universe — a tiny taste of the kingdom of God. Of resurrected life. Of what awaits each of us. 

All this challenges my heart to see the miracles of Jesus in the same way — as a tiny taste of the goodness of God and the coming of the Kingdom with its promise of healing and life. And it invites me to consider the tiny bites, the little tastes of miracle hidden in the sadness, the uncertainty, the fear and suffering that is now engulfing Fernando. It invites me to see the tiny miracles wrapped inside Dominica’s heart as she sits with him each day, in the care and compassion of so many friends and strangers, in the expertise of medical staff, the tender care of aides, the strength of therapists and especially of a shattered family hanging on to one another — their hugs creating strength and hope and faith and courage. Miracles all. The landscape of the coming kingdom — that’s miracle enough.