|
In today's Gospel, Jesus works a curious miracle, since He says little or nothing to blatantly indicate that he is doing the healing: asking the man to stand forth and to stretch out his hand is certainly indicative, but it would be insufficient to convict Jesus in court of working on a Sabbath. We know what Jesus is doing, and so do the scribes and Pharisees, but he eludes their grasp entirely. And the result of this is that "they became frenzied and began asking one another what could be done about him." This reaction is so violent and so resistant to Jesus that it almost seems as if there were demons involved here... Where does this place us? I suspect that we might question our own reaction to the appearance of Jesus in our lives when he works miracles that might be explained as a simple coincidence or a natural occurrence. Do we just chalk God's love up to natural causes? Is there some subtle demon of whatever sort fomenting our resistance? We need to pay attention to God's action in our lives: if we do believe that God loves us, we must believe that he does so constantly and in all ways, even in what is "natural," in what is hard to see or in what is hard to accept. We can either look, see, and believe or we can demand that he perform the kind of miracles that fireworks and a light show would call attention to --- but what kind of love would we be showing in that case? Faith and trust are not based on legal, mathematical, or any other sort of rigorous proof --- it is based on knowing the person of Jesus Christ and letting our experience of the love God has for us form us. |