Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
June 29, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.29.24_Landry_ConCon.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we encounter him work two dramatic miracles.
* Both were the result of a journey, when a Jairus a synagogue official comes to Jesus and drops down before and a woman with a hemorrhage makes a trip along the ground to touch Jesus’ clothes. As the Church in the United States continues to make its four-part Eucharistic Pilgrimage to Indianapolis where the National Eucharistic Congress will take place starting July 17, it’s important for us to ponder the pilgrimage each of us is called to make to come to Jesus.
* The healing of the woman with the hemorrhage is one of the literally most touching of all Jesus’ cures. Jesus was on his way with Jairus, the synagogue leader, to care for his daughter who at the time was on the point of death. St. Mark tells us that a large crowd was following Jesus and pressing in on him. As happens in almost any big crowd, people were bumping into him left and right. Yet in the midst of all of that commotion on the move, Jesus is touched in a different way by this anonymous woman — and Jesus immediately knew he was touched differently. The suffering woman believed that if she could just touch the tassel of Jesus’ garments, she would be cured. And she was not to be disappointed.
* Jesus, upon feeling his healing power go out in response to her faith, stopped and asked, somewhat remarkably, “Who touched my clothes?” It would be like if an ambulance driver speeding to attend to a 911 call all of a sudden heard a faint, friendly tap of the horn and then slammed on the brakes trying to find out who was trying to say hello. Jesus stopped, and doubtless to the confusion and concern of Jairus, began to ask who had come into contact with the hem of his tunic. It shows how big the crowd must have been banging into him that he didn’t even see the woman approach him to touch the edge of his garments. “Who touched my clothes?,” he asked again. Jesus was never interested in merely working miracles of bodily healing. Those were always a prelude to the greater miracle of healing souls, and that healing happened and happens through a personal relationship with him. That’s why he never worked “mass miracles of healing,” but always cured people one-by-one, because he wanted to have that personal bond. So Jesus wanted to meet and enter into a relationship with the person he had just physically cured.
* After Jesus’ question, the woman approached with fear and trembling, fell down before him and told him everything, including how she had sought to pick-pocket a healing miracle from him without his knowledge. She was afraid not just because the stop she had caused Jesus to make was going to prove fatal for the daughter of the understandably impatient, powerful synagogue leader, but because by her touching Jesus with her effusion of blood, she was making him ritually impure according to the Jewish ceremonial law and incapable without ablutions of entering the synagogue. That ritual impurity meant that she had been suffering not only physically for twelve years, but also socially and religiously: because of her bleeding, she couldn’t touch anyone and was basically cut off from human contact; she was even, in a sense,
Episode: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/thirteenth-sunday-in-ordinary-time-b-conversations-with-consequences-podcast-june-29-2024/
Podcast: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/category/audio-homily/podcast/
