AUGUST 31, 2011 – LUKE 4:38-44
Saint Luke’s description of the miraculous healing of Simon Peter’s
mother-in-law has an unusual feature that invites us to reflection. When
Simon’s family asked Jesus to heal her, we are told that JESUS REBUKED THE FEVER, AND IT LEFT HER. The impression we are
given is that our Lord personalizes the fever as if it were a free agent. Was
this because he was sensitive to the role of a demon in causing the serious
illness from which she suffered? We know from a later miraculous healing of an
epileptic that Jesus healed by rebuking a demon with a direct command addressed
to the demon considered as the cause of his illness. In any case, our Lord was
conscious of possessing an effective power to heal in a manner that far
transcends the laws of nature. He often, through compassion, used this power in
healing a variety of afflictions. He was so endowed with this marvelous gift
that he confidently transmitted it to his chosen apostles who made many
converts when they too performed such miraculous healings in the name of Jesus.
One of the purposes of such miracles, as I see it, is to teach an important
lesson concerning the nature of the world we are part of. This material world
is not self-sustaining. It remains open in its deepest level of existence to
Divine action. God not only created the universe, He sustains it in existence
and continues to influence by His interventions as the Hebrew Scriptures make
clear. We read, for example, in the prophet second Isaiah: "He has
stretched out the heavens llke a cloth, spread them
like a tent for men to live in. He reduces princes to nothing; he annihilates
the rulers of the world." Note the change to the present tense as he
declares that God acts in history as a regular thing. Not only in miracles that
were performed by various Hebrew figures such as Moses, but also in history and
in people’s lives. Of course, many who think of themselves as modern and sophisticated, deny the reliability of such inspiration and
miraculous powers; they rationalize them away to their own satisfaction. Their
belief in materialism and atheism is based on an act of faith on their part,
not on science. The influence of such liberal, materialism has been rapidly
spreading in our own country and has already undermined belief in God in wide
areas of formerly Christian countries. For in our time and in our Western
culture the claim is increasingly urged that the universe is self-contained and
is wholly self-sustaining. It is widely asserted that it has no need of a
personal Creator for its origin and its continuing in existence. In short, the
material world is considered as an absolute and to be the whole of existing
reality. This strain of thinking is having wide influence on the values and
politics that are strongly influential in our present society and have been
increasingly adopted by the liberal press, by the professors in our
Universities, by the liberal politicians who make our laws.
In spite of its claims, however, such convictions are a form of faith, and
based on a prior choice that is masked, often remaining quite unconscious.
There is no such thing as a bare objective fact; every objective encounter can
be known only through some interaction that is known through perception. Every
event or natural finding that is experienced is an interaction of a subjective
self, a knowing subject, who contributes something of the personal to the
knowledge gained by experience. The event and the data it supplies take on
meaning only in a human subject, a self, whose way of perceiving and
interpreting depends on a broad variety of interior factors. A recent instance
that illustrates this truth is the medical report of an American physician in
In this and similar miraculous healings, it is not the substance of the
healed person that is altered for the better but the state of the body. Here at
this Eucharist we are celebrating a supernatural intervention by God that is a
uniquely great miracle in that the very substance of bread and wine is
transformed so as to become the Body and Blood of the Risen Savior. It is God
Himself who effects this transubstantiation, as this change is termed, for He
has given the priests the power so to serve as the instrument of His personal intervention
by way of sharing his own person with us in an act of loving faith. May our way
of living be such as is worthy of His love thus given to us even now. Ω
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