Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Miracles are an extraordinary form of God’s grace. In today’s Gospel reading, we are provided with two accounts of miracles performed by Jesus. In the first account, a woman who has been suffering from an affliction for twelve years touches Jesus’ cloak and is immediately healed. In the second account, a father asks Jesus to heal his daughter who is near death. When Jesus arrives at the house where the daughter is located, he finds a room full of people mourning because the child has already died. In response, Jesus takes the child by the hand and says “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” (Mk 5:41) In response, the little girl arose. In each of the miracles described today, Jesus is responding to those who have belief in him and in doing so he demonstrates God’s willingness to respond to our faith. In part, through miracles, God demonstrates his power over the physical world and death itself, and the miracles performed by Jesus attest that he is the Son of God. These gifts of extraordinary grace serve not only as a response to the faithful, but also as an invitation for others to believe. Yet we frequently find that this invitation is not recognized.

In our secular society, miracles are routinely ignored. When an event that cannot be explained by science occurs, our society is conditioned to write off these events as random chance, coincidence or luck. For many, the belief in nothing seems more reasonable than the belief in God. As Christians, we have been granted the grace to see God at work in both the ordinary and the inexplicable. We have made our choice to believe, and in doing so, we are open to seeing God’s response, which occurs all around us each day.

One of my favorite statements on the extraordinary grace of miracles was told to me by a priest. He indicated that almost every time someone was going to tell him about an extraordinary grace that had occurred in their life the person would begin by saying “you are not going to believe this.” He told me that he had heard this phrase a thousand times, but that his response was without exception the same. His response was always “I bet I will.”

- John Sperino