5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

I have a friend, Roy, who at the age of 48 years old, contracted cerebral malaria. As you can imagine he became critically ill and was admitted to ICU where he spent several weeks. At a number of points while he was in ICU, it was touch and go. In fact the doctors told him after he recovered that his recovery was a small miracle, and by right he should have died. Having had such a close brush with death, Roy decided that he would take the remaining years of his life as a bonus. It should have been curtains for him at age 48, but God spared him and gave him some bonus years – like “mbasera” (the Shona word for “freebie”). You don’t deserve mbasera, it is given at the discretion of the seller, but some people when they go shopping at the market expect to get mbasera. If they don’t get it, they are very annoyed and feel that they have been cheated. The fact is that when we take what is supposed to be a gift and turn it into a right, we get a very distorted picture of reality. This is what we often do with the gift of life. Every day of life that we are given to live by God is pure gift. It is nothing that we deserve, and it certainly is not a right. Often, though, because we have the expectation to live up until at least the age of seventy – three score years and ten - or 72.27 years which is the current average life expectancy in the world – it takes us a long time to get to the feeling that we are living on bonus time from God. When Roy recovered from cerebral malaria, it changed his whole outlook on life. He now had nothing to prove, he didn’t have any goals or expectations for what his life should be like. By all calculations it should have been over, so if this was a bonus, he was happy to give this bonus time all to God and to let God have God’s way with him in these remaining years.

If on the other hand, we take life and good health as a right that we should expect, then when things don’t go our way, we become cynical and depressed, like Job in our first reading. In the pit of depression, Job compares his life to the thread that runs through the weaver’s shuttle. He can see the end of the thread approaching and when the thread runs out, so does his hope. There is a very clever word play that is operating here in the Hebrew, for the word for thread (Tikvah) is the same word in Hebrew used for hope. This metaphor of our lives as the thread on a weaver’s shuttle is a powerful image worth exploring. But perhaps the weaver’s shuttle is an alien image to us, so imagine instead a spool of red thread (representing our earthly life) on a sowing machine. As the garments of our lives are sown, the red thread on the spool gradually runs out until there’s only one turn left on the spool. Seeing this, you might, like Job, get depressed, thinking that all there is to life is that limited amount of thread, and that’s the only time you have. What Job doesn’t realize is that as soon as the red thread runs out (our life here on earth) – there is an infinitely long white thread (resurrected life) attached to the end of the red thread that will continue running on forever. The sewing machine will never run out of thread. Going back to the word play on hope and thread – this means that our hope should never run out – because even when we see the end of the red thread approaching, our hope does not run out because there is an eternal supply of white thread.

The white thread is the abundance of life that Jesus has come to give us through the resurrection. The challenge that Jesus had during his public ministry was to find a way to give people the hope that came from the resurrection, before his own resurrection had actually happened. As we know well from the trick question posed to him by the Sadducees, not all Jews believed in a life after death. The way that Jesus chose to communicate the bonus life that God gives us was through his miracles, especially his healing miracles. I imagine that just as for my friend Roy, anyone who was healed by Jesus must have felt like they had got a bonus. Our gospel today reveals that there is an intimate connection between Jesus’ healing miracles and the power of his own resurrection. The Greek word used for Jesus raising up Simon’s mother-in-law, “egeiren” is the same word used to describe Jesus’ own resurrection. Mark is trying to tell us that Jesus’ healing miracles and Jesus’ resurrection are actually all part of the same big story: God sharing God’s abundant life with us, freely and gratuitously.

For the resurrection doesn’t just mean that we receive an abundance of life after death. It also means an abundance of life during life – which is what Jesus’ miracles are all about. It is not just through extraordinary miracles that we receive “extra red thread,” (e.g. being healed from a life-threatening disease). Simply knowing that once our red thread runs out, we have an infinite supply of white thread should mean that we don’t have to be miserly about how we spend our red thread. We don’t need to be depressed and cynical like Job. We can spend our red thread gratuitously, without fear, in the service of others. This is exactly what Peter’s mother-in-law immediately starts doing – she starts serving Jesus. She doesn’t say: “thank goodness you saved my life Lord, now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to hurry off: I almost died there, so I’ve got a lot of things on my bucket list that I’ve suddenly realized I need to get done before I go.” No, instead, she makes her life about serving Jesus because she has moved into the space of God’s gratuitous and abundant life, realizing that the time she has is hers by gift alone.

Once people in Capernaum hear about the miraculous healing, suddenly a whole bunch of sick people turn up outside Peter’s door, and Jesus heals them and casts out demons. Early the next morning, long before dawn breaks, he goes off to a lonely place to pray. The disciples come looking for him and tell him that there are many more people from Capernaum who have come to be healed. Instead of going to heal them, Jesus tells his disciples that he has to go and preach the Kingdom of God in other towns. Now we might ask ourselves, if Jesus was intent on witnessing to God’s abundant life, why didn’t he heal all the sick people in Capernaum? Asking why Jesus heals some and not others is like asking God to account for why God choses to put the switch-over from red thread to white thread in a particular place. It entirely up to God to choose how to share God’s abundant life with us – whether in “extra red thread” or in white thread. Jesus’ miracles are not meant to replace an entire healthcare system or to eradicate suffering from our human condition. Instead they are meant to be signs that get us to believe that what we are living is already a bonus, whether it feels like it or not. We don’t need to be healed ourselves, there are many ways for us to transition to living life as a bonus – as this scene from the Chosen powerfully demonstrates.

Let’s not be fussy about which way God decides to bless us with God’s abundant life. Let’s not spend our time worrying about when our spool of thread will switch from red to white - let’s leave that in God’s hands, and while we still have red thread – spend it abundantly in the service of our Lord and Saviour. Jesus’ miracles are extraordinary moments of heaven touching earth, just like when we celebrate mass – this is a moment of heaven touching earth. The point of such moments is to give us hope and point us towards the day when heaven and earth will truly become one. In the meantime, this hope enables us to live through the ordinariness of our lives and deal with the suffering and tragedy that come our way, knowing that ultimately whether we experience a healing miracle or not in our earthly life, the greatest miracle of the resurrection from the dead awaits all those who trust in God.

Questions for reflection:

1. Are there days when, like Job, I find my life a drudgery, flying past me without much I can do about it? Do I long for a miracle to catapult me out of my cynicism and boredom? How might the miracle of the resurrection bring new hope and new thread to my sewing machine?
2. Where have I recently felt heaven touching my earth?
3. Where in my life is Jesus calling me to be like little James, where has Jesus trusted me with giving a witness to others by bearing my little cross with radiant hope and joy?