Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
It is very tempting to read today’s first lesson (Isaiah 38:1-6, 21-22, 7-8) and today’s psalm (also from Isaiah 38, verses 10, 11, 12abcd, 16) as being passages that are primarily about how God saves us from death if only we pray. Both of these scriptures are about Hezekiah and how he is on his last legs; indeed his whole kingdom is being crushed under the weight of a siege by the Assyrians and the future for the Hebrews looks distinctly bleak. The prophet Isaiah tells Hezekiah that he will certainly die and lose the battle, but then Hezekiah utters a plaintive prayer to God, and God prepares to do not just one miracle but three (Hezekiah is healed, the kingdom is saved, the sun moves backwards). So, it is terribly tempting to think that these scriptures have been given to us to remember that in times of crisis, God will work miracles for us and save us.
How many people, including myself, have then suffered some loss of faith because God did not, in fact, appear in the ways we wanted him to? I remember a friend of mine some years ago who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was a very devout Christian and had many friends who hoped that he might receive a miracle, so those of us who were his friends prayed with all our might that he would be healed. We believed that God would work a last-minute miracle as God did for Hezekiah. But it was not so. I asked my friend, as he neared closer to death, why this had to happen to him of all people: devout Christian, loving husband and father of young children, good worker in the community. I very, very clearly remember his answer: “Why not me?”
In an instant, I realized the error of my thinking, because of his excellent and simple answer. His point was that he, as good as his friends saw him, was still only human, and not at all the Lord of time, space or death. It is that reminder that links the Old Testament readings to today’s gospel (Matthew 12:1-8), which depicts Jesus admonishing the Pharisees about the fact that the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. The Pharisees must have thought to themselves, “How can a mere man like Jesus be the Lord of a day, or more still, Lord of a commandment that only God can give (to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy)?” But the Christian belief is that Jesus is the incarnate God and really is the Lord, not just of the days and nights, but of the whole of creation. This is a true mystery that keeps me marveling at who God is.
So, the memory of my friend still serves to remind me of what it means to (really and truly) have faith in God. God is not a being like one of us, to be ordered around and pouted at when life, in all its variegations, does not happen the way we would choose. At some point in our lives, we can all probably presume that we will suffer, but also that there might be moments of joy, and we can pretty much count on the fact that we will die. We do not know when or how or why any of these things (good or bad) might happen, despite our attempts to avert disaster and court happiness.
If we are to have faith in God, that faith must be accompanied by the fact that the ways of God are unknown and that therefore, our own lives are mysterious as well. To have faith is to relinquish control, or the illusion of control, and to accept that God is indeed the Lord of all our days. To believe and accept that is also to believe that, regardless of what unforeseen events might happen in our lives, God always keeps us.
- Jana M. Bennett