A Benedictine Monk talks about how he looks at the bulletin board every morning before prayer. The items he pays most attention to are the requests for prayers. They come from all over and are about almost everything. There is a regular "prayer client" who mentions various intentions. One time, in her list, she mentioned the need for prayers for someone who was seriously ill. The following day, she left a message saying, "No need to pray for (him); he's already dead."
As Catholics, as Christians, we pray for both the living and the dead. In the story of the woman who told the monks not to bother praying for the person who had died, there is a common thread with today's Gospel passage from St. Mark.
In the story, we encounter Jairus, the official of the synagogue, who didn't hesitate to pray for his daughter's healing. Upon arriving at the house, the people told him not to bother Jesus any longer because the girl had died. But Jesus told the father, "Do not be afraid; just have faith." He continued to express his faith in Jesus, and his daughter was raised back to life. Jesus performed a miracle with the faith of Jairus.
God's Word for us today helps us to examine certain traits of our faith relationship with the LORD.
The first trait is that the way to healing in Jesus is through faith in Him, and we express our faith in our prayers. The girl's father was not discouraged by the report of his daughter's death and kept hoping against hope that God would answer his prayer. Despite the understandable but hopeless remarks of the people about the girl's condition, Jesus kept inspiring her father, telling him to have faith. In our relationship with God, faith paves the way for healing: certainly, spiritual healing and, sometimes, physical healing.
The second trait would be to look at death, again, from the viewpoint of the Christian faith. Some of us can relate real stories of extraordinary healings even at the point of dying. But most of us know that although our ailing loved ones did not recover and now rest in peace, we still believe in the LORD; we still believe that, on a different level, our deceased family members and friends have indeed been raised to new life in a very new way.
In our first reading today, we heard that God's greatest desire for us is life. It isn't that God created us to be immortal like Him; we are mortal. But there are two kinds of death: physical death and spiritual death.
We experience physical death at the end of our lease on earthly life. But we may still be physically alive while having experienced spiritual death.
Through Jesus' Resurrection, we know, and we believe that, beyond physical death, there is eternal life with God by our faith in Christ. Yet what Satan aims at in this life is our spiritual death, our separation from God, while still alive. It is the more dangerous death that we can experience and against which we must guard ourselves. It is in this death of our spirit that Satan wants to possess us.
With bodily ailments, both kinds of death are possible. We may physically die if the illness turns deadly serious. But we could also die spiritually as we begin to despair and distrust the LORD and refuse His offer of a greater life. Illness can turn us away from God, but it can also lead to greater faith in the LORD. The faith of Jairus led to new life for his child. He serves as a model of living in faith.
May our prayer today, and always, be for spiritual life and the hope that that life can be renewed – even resurrected – by our faith in Jesus and our sincere hope that Jesus can always fill us with His powerful love – in this life and the next.+
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