Mark 5, 21-43
Sunday, 27 June 2021 (13th T O B)
St. Mark tells us that among the people who surrounded Jesus, a sick woman believed that if she touched him, she would be cured, and that he also raised the daughter of Jairus, the leader of a synagogue.
Faced with pain, illness or death, many Christians are filled with doubts and do not know how to deal with these realities of our lives (and which sooner or later affect us all). We do not have a miracle recipe to deal with them, but we can give them a meaning that helps us to cope with them.
The book of Genesis says that God saw all that he had created and that it was all good. He created life, not evil and death. These are the consequence of man’s free action in the face of God. Pride and self-sufficiency led him to have to suffer. But God did not leave man abandoned. He sent us his Son, who shows us by his works that he is the Lord of sickness and death. He healed the woman of her haemorrhages, and raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. He did not do this magically or automatically, but depending on the faith of the one who comes to him. The woman thought that “just by touching him…”, and Jairus: “come to my house so that my daughter may be healed and live”. It is the faith of these people in Jesus that performs the miracle. They have full confidence in his words: “he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live”.
These readings today do not provide us with a “solution” no matter how much faith we have in Jesus, but they do enlighten us so that we know how to face them with faith in God. Jesus continues to act in the Church, in the Sacraments, and he tells us the same as he did to Jairus when he was told of the death of his daughter. “Do not be afraid, it is enough that you have faith”.
Juan Ramón Gómez Pascual, cmf
