Tuesday January 31, 2006 (Audio) Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Reading (2 Samuel 18:9-10, 14b,
24-25a, 30-19:3)
Gospel (St. Mark 5:21-43)
In the readings today, we hear about two parents who have experienced
the death of a child. We hear about David and the death of his son Absalom.
Absalom had rebelled against David, put an army together, and had gone against
his own father. We hear also about this little girl who had apparently died,
the people were weeping and mourning, and Jesus came to the house and healed
the little girl.
In this we see the mercy of God toward His children, His human
children. God loves us so much that He came to us in order to heal us. Just as
He would say to this little girl, Get up, arise, so He says to us. Ultimately, the healing is
going to take place only after death when we rise definitively forever, but
even in this life there is the interior healing. Oftentimes, that is not going
to be accompanied by a physical healing, because sometimes the physical illness
is going to actually be better for us than if we did not have it, but the
interior healing is what is most important, the forgiveness of sin and the
recognition of our union with Christ. And so Our Lord touches the hearts of
each of us, and from the death of our sin, He calls to us, Arise.
But we also see the mercy of God as He looks upon His children in the
death of their own sins. Just like David, God would be able to say, My son,
my son, if only it had been me instead of you. God, in fact, did exactly that. He sent His own
Son, Who is God, and He died in place of us. God took such mercy upon us
because He is a Father, that even when we had rebelled in a manner which was
worse than what Absalom had done against his father David, God being a loving
father was not going to condemn us. Because of His love for us, He sent His Son
to die for us. It is the attitude and disposition of any parent that the parent
would rather die than see their child die; the parent would rather suffer than
see their child suffer. So God, Who is obviously the perfect parent, did
exactly that. He took on our suffering; He took on death for us. We still have
to suffer and we still have to die, but now it has an entirely different
meaning to it. When we look at our suffering now, we can unite it with His, and
we recognize that death is the only means to life. So when Our Lord calls us to
rise in that definitive time at the resurrection from the dead, that will only
be because He Himself has already come to suffer for us, to die for us, and to
be the first one to rise.
We see the pattern in the situation of these two persons in the Gospel
and in the first reading. We see the attitude of the parents seeking to heal
their children, to suffer and die rather than watch their children suffer and
die. We also see the ultimate love of God, and we hear the words ringing in the
hearts of each one of us to arise and to be with Him forever.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.