After Epiphany - Friday - January 10, 2025
Homily
Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him and said, ‘Heal! And the leprosy left him immediately’. This is one of the first acts of healing performed by Jesus. We call these healings ‘miracles’. The Bible calls them ‘wonders’.
What is a miracle? -- For us a miracle is something that is beyond the laws of nature. We have identified what we consider to be a certain number of what we call ‘laws of nature’, and we call anything that is against or beyond these laws of nature or cannot be explained by them a ‘miracle’.
For the people of the Bible there were no miracles, because there were no laws of nature. They believed that all of creation was subject to one law, which was the free and unpredictable will of God. Everything good that happened was considered a sign of God's love and mercy; and when something extraordinarily good happened, they spoke of a ‘wonder of God’, a marvelous manifestation of His love for us.
When Jesus does what was foreshadowed in yesterday's Gospel, when He makes the lame man walk, the blind man see, the deaf man hear, He does not want to show Himself as a miracle-worker; He simply wants to show the Father's love for all His children.
Jesus can show that love of the Father, because He is in total communion with Him. Luke, in today's Gospel, true to his own guidance, mentions again, just after this wonderful act of Jesus ‘... He would always go away somewhere where He could be alone and pray’.
The crowds, Luke says, gather to listen to Him and to be healed of their sickness. Yet we know that the same crowds will gradually abandon Him and, in the end, cry out ‘crucify him’. Let us pray that our own faith and trust in Him may be firm and may survive all the storms of our existence.