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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
A desperate man calls upon Jesus to heal his son. Jesus listens. Jesus will listen to us as well.
Call upon Jesus
Obviously, I don’t have children of my own, so I can’t imagine, or I don’t have the experience, rather, of knowing what it’s like when a child is seriously ill, knowing what it’s like for a parent. I’ve certainly accompanied close friends.
I had a friend who had a little baby girl who had two surgeries for major cancer that killed almost everybody else they knew that had had it in the first year of her life. So I certainly saw the difficulties. Now, she is a mother herself, and everything worked out for her, but I’ve seen it in parish ministry, I’ve seen it in schools. I’ve seen the absolute struggle and unbelievable difficulty that comes with something like this.
And so we can certainly imagine what this guy is going through in the Gospel. Whose child is sick. Desperately sick, obviously. Not an average, routine thing. You don’t trouble someone, well, I guess maybe you could, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to the kind of interaction we see in the Gospel if we’re talking about the common cold.
Okay, so the presumption is that this child, this son, is really, really sick. It’s very hard to really grasp where the presence of God is in the face of evil. It’s the biggest problem. Aquinas said there were two basic fundamental challenges to belief in God.
The first is the belief in human beings that ultimately we will come to be able to know whatever there is to know. There’ll be nothing left, there’ll be no mystery because we’ll know everything. Even in the 13th century, I think there was a feeling that human beings had this kind of pride that we would know everything we needed to know, we wouldn’t need anything else.
But the biggest challenge, Aquinas says, is the problem of evil. With an all-loving God, we know the basic problem, with an all-loving God, why is there evil in the world? Now, of course, the challenge has to do with the reason that there’s evil.
It’s easy sometimes to blame God for evil and to say if God only stepped in and did something, that would be fine. But the reality is we know that a lot of the evil we experience in our world, we do to ourselves. But at the end of the day, isn’t the stance that we’re supposed to take as believers the stance of this royal official?
Coming to Jesus and asking him for healing. For those we love, for the world, for those who are in places of conflict throughout Africa, Ukraine, the Middle East, for people that struggle in broken relationships, maybe even violent relationships, for the types of struggles that come with people who are in jobs they can’t stand or they work for employers or bosses that aren’t kind or aren’t good, whose demands are unreasonable.
We could go on and on with the struggles and the challenges that people face. But the solution to them all is the same. Come down. To say to Jesus, “Come down. “Come down before my faith goes completely away. “Come down before I become so overwhelmed “with the difficulties of my life. “Come down to help me to know that you love me “and care for me and that you love and care for others.”
Let us ask the Lord today, with whatever we may find ourselves dealing with, let us ask him for the grace that we might reach out to him so that just as he did for the boy who was sick, he may do for us.
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