Tuesday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
I wonder how many people are feeling kind of dead, these days. Obviously, I don't mean the kind of death that requires a funeral mass, but I do mean the kind of "death" of feeling isolated. Isolation often means feeling empty, purposeless, and insignificant. In these days of continued high unemployment or underemployment it is easy to feel unimportant - and unemployment (or even sometimes a good retirement!) cuts us off from co-workers and people we know, so that we feel isolated. Illness and old age similarly isolate people.
Even more, these days in the Catholic Church, across the wide spectrum of "conservative" and "liberal" and "traditionalist" and "Vatican II" - I know there are people who feel isolated, and cut off from their brothers and sisters in Christ. This political season, it's especially hard not to feel isolated given the presence of Catholics in the presidential election. It's hard to know what to do with that particular kind of empty, painful feeling of not being sure where we belong.
Today's gospel reading showcases both these kinds of death (Luke 7:11-17). The first one - the readily apparent one - is the son, but the second is the mother. Luke takes great pains to note two important details about this mother's life: the first is that this son is her only son, and the second is that she is a widow. For this woman, this is a double whammy. In ancient Palestinian culture, women's livelihoods depended on having male relatives who could support them, so the fact that this woman no longer has a husband, and her son is dead, means that she herself is likely to become homeless, eating hand to mouth, and could mean eventual starvation unless she is able to find another benefactor.
In that kind of context, Jesus' compassion for this mother is all the more significant. God stands with and reaches out to those who suffer, in unexpected ways. In this story, Jesus responds by giving two commands. The first command he gives to the mother: "stop your weeping!" But the second command he gives to the son: "Arise!"
It is not the commands themselves that cause these two people to become alive - it is their response to God's commands. The dead man sits up and speaks; the mother receives her son.
We might then ask: what is God's command to us, that we are called to respond to? I think part of God's command to us is in today's first reading (1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 27-31a) where Paul speaks about the importance of the Body and calls us to remember that we are many, but one. We are commanded to remember that we cannot do it all: that we need each other and cannot reject each other. Conservative or liberal or whatever label gets placed - we need each other. Christ has risen from the dead, and we are members of that risen body. We don't get to go without an arm, and we should grieve whenever a member of the body has left.
When I was a kid, growing up in the Methodist Church, I used to sing a song that went like this: "Arise! Arise! Arise, arise, my soul arise! Shake off your guilty fears, and rise!" It's the "guilty fears" part that I had going through my head as I was writing this reflection. What guilty fears prevent us from being part of the Risen Body? What fears prevent us from reaching out to other members of this Body, especially those who are isolated by unemployment, illness, sorrow, or a feeling of not belonging?
Am I more in love with being "dead" or am I willing to rise in response to Christ?
- Jana M. Bennett