The Gospel for today reminds me of the place in the Catholic Mass where the congregation says, “…only say the word and I will be healed.” How similar this is to the “If only” of the woman who touched Jesus’s cloak.
I think of these stories when I have the “if onlies” myself. If only I made more money, if only it wouldn’t snow so much, if only I didn’t have any more papers to grade, and so on. There is a difference between these everyday “if onlies” and the pleas to Christ, though. The pleas to Christ require, and work through, faith. God can take faith and make things happen through it.
If I ask God to help me with my workload, He is more than likely going to ask me what I have done to manage it myself. It’s not a matter of faith here as much as it is a matter of context.
The plea of the synagogue leader and of the ill woman have a specific context; Christ is at their center. Preceding their plea is belief and faith. They believe that these things will happen, and, Christ being what He is, they happen.
The miracles of faith in our lives are often the ones we don’t see clearly until later. They’re not usually the blinding flash type. The greatest miracle, to me, is when, after a time of turbulence I come out at the end relatively unhurt, having consciously kept faith in God, and realize that things are, or will be, for the moment, all right, fine, or even good. That’s the time when I am inclined to say, “If only I had known!”
And finally the Gospeller says that “news of this (the resurrection of the young daughter) spread throughout the district.” What would happen, I wonder, if all of us spread the wonders that even the littlest miracles of faith have wrought in us? Perhaps this is working through these daily reflections.
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Since its inception in 1997, Online Ministries has been blessed to have myriad members of the Creighton University community offer their personal reflections on the daily scripture readings.
