The Tenth Sunday of the Year: 2016

THE miracles of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ make indeed an impression on all who hear of, and believe them; but on different men in different ways. For some amazed at His miracles done on the bodies of men, have no knowledge to discern the greater; whereas some admire the more ample fulfilment in the souls of men at the present time of those things which they hear of as having been wrought on their bodies. The Lord Himself saith, “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will.” Not of course that the Son “quickeneth” some, the Father others; but the Father and the Son “quicken” the same; for the Father doeth all things by the Son. Let no one then who is a Christian doubt, that even at the present time the dead are raised. Now all men have eyes, wherewith they can see the dead rise again in such sort, as the son of that widow rose, of whom we have just read out of the Gospel; but those eyes wherewith men see the dead in heart rise again, all men have not, save those who have risen already in heart themselves. It is a greater miracle to raise again one who is to live forever, than to raise one who must die again. –St. Augustine

 

I say to you, arise.

The miracles of Jesus naturally raise many questions: How did this happen? Did it in fact happen? But the question that we should really ask is ‘why did this happen?’ As to ‘how’ we are never told. As to ‘whether’ you either accept the reliability of Holy Scripture or you don’t.  Miracles are always pedagogical, i.e. they are designed not simply to solve a physical problem, sickness, bodily impediments, death but to teach us. Or better, miracles are mystagogical, to use the term favored by the Fathers, i.e. intended to lead us into the mystery of Christ. All the miracles have a physical element which points us to a spiritual problem: the blind are given sight because we are all blind; the deaf are healed because we are all deaf; the lame walk because we are all lame; the 5000 are fed because we are all hungry; the dead are raised because we are all dead. So St. Augustine says: ‘miracles done on the bodies of men’ so we might  have ‘knowledge to discern the greater miracles’.

The first reading shows that this was already the case in the miracles of the Old Testament: the widow, whose son has died, is herself dead: “what have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” Anyone who has lost a child will immediately recognize the spiritual death of the widow. Elijah takes to heart the widow’s suffering: “O Lord my God, hast thou brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?” But ultimately he raises not only the son but the mother as well: she confesses her faith: “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”

In the Gospel the raising of the dead man is also a raising of his mother. Jesus is motivated not by the dead son but entirely by compassion for the spiritually dead mother. ‘When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” He commands the dead man to rise and reveals himself as the Lord of death and life. For Jesus the decisive thing is the awakening and liberation of men from the spiritual death caused by sin. The miracle itself is ‘less’ than the spiritual raising of the dead. “Which is easier to say to the paralytic ‘your sins are forgiven’ or to say ‘rise, take up your pallet and walk’? Because Jesus through the power of the Cross has authority to forgive sin, he also has the lesser authority to heal the physically sick and to raise men from physical death.

From this perspective we can see that in the readings this Sunday there are not only two raisings of the dead but three. Paul too is raised from the dead. In Paul’s conversion we have an entire existence transformed into its spiritual opposite. His life was devoted completely to the destruction of the followers of Jesus. But suddenly is turned upside down so that he can proclaim the Gospel, ‘not man’s gospel’.  ^“For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ”. In fact Paul understands that this has been his destiny all along: “God has set me apart before I was born”. The fall from the horse is really a return to a prior vocation, just as physical death can be called a mere episode, a ‘sleep’ as Jesus called it.

In the Epistle to the Romans St. Paul says:  ‘if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him’. Those words were directed to the living not the dead’. So too Jesus says to us, who are alive:

I say to you, arise.