Daily Gospel Reflection for September 17, 2019

Today's Gospel: Luke 7:11-17 The man is dead. He is part of his mother, as all of us mothers know. Furthermore, he is the only son of a widow, leaving this woman defenseless, without living son or husband. She weeps. he weeps for past joys now lost; she weeps for a future security that is now erased. She is alone and lonely. She is vulnerable. She is broken. This is not how it is supposed to be, mothers burying their children. Jesus Christ sees her; He takes in the situation at a glance: her sorrow, her vulnerability, the man being borne to the place of the dead. Upon seeing her anguish and her son’s corpse, He does not recoil. He is not repulsed. No, upon seeing the broken body of the one and the broken heart of the other, He moves toward her. “Do not weep,” He says, for this is why He is here. His mission is to heal, to put back to right order all that is broken, disordered, wounded, ruptured, and dead. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, wrote, “Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christianity. When understood at a sufficiently deep level, this expresses the entire content of redemption.” This is why Jesus comes; this is His fundamental mission -- to heal. He came to heal not in some distant future, but now. He is here, dear reader, to heal you and to heal me. This is the apostolic mission of the Church: to heal, to put back into right order man and God, man and man, and man and himself. There are dead areas of our lives over which we weep. There are parts of our past that lie as dead corpses. There are hopes for our future never realized that anguish us. Jesus see this and moves toward us. “Do not weep.” He desires to heal. He is waiting upon our free will to give Him access to these dead parts of us. Let Him touch the coffins in your life.