Open to the Will of God

Homily for Thursday of the 1st Week in Ordinary Time

We heard the story of this leper in the opening chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel just last week. We are reminded once again that his prayer is not simply a request for healing. He makes the request with the understanding that Jesus may not wish to heal him, and he is ready to accept Jesus’ decision. Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, he places God’s will as a priority.

To offset that picture, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us of an incident in the Hebrew Scriptures which does not take God’s will into account. Meribah is identified as a place of strife, a strife that is born of the fact that the Israelites are thirsty and impatient with God’s response to their request for water. The sacred writer tells us that they “tempted” or “tested” the Lord.

These words remind us of Jesus’ response to the Devil when he told Jesus to throw himself off the parapet of the Temple to see if God would save him from falling to his death. “It is written, you shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”

The familiar phrase, “Harden not your hearts,” becomes our response today. Just what exactly does this mean? I can think of several literary characters who display hardened hearts; perhaps the most notorious was Ebenezer Scrooge. However, in terms of the Scriptures, a hard-hearted person is one who cannot or fails to place one’s trust in God. The Israelites had seen the wonders that God had wrought in freeing them from Egypt. Yet they did not trust God’s providence and quarreled or grumbled against God. The leper in today’s Gospel is the antithesis to their lack of trust. He believes that Jesus can heal him and trusts Jesus to do God’s will on his behalf.

Faced with the difficulties of life in a time of pandemic and of geo-political discord, we too must trust that God will prevail against evil. Until then, we look to the Eucharist as proof that God is with us in all our temptations and all our struggles.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator