Words matter. Prayers matter

The LORD bless you and keep you!  The LORD let his face shine upon you and be gracious to you!  The LORD look upon you kindly and give you peace!

During Christmas we celebrated God’s becoming human in Jesus, an event at once so familiar that perhaps we take it for granted, but at the same time so incredible that we can’t really absorb its meaning.  So the Church gives us, in the liturgy of the days and weeks following Christmas, lessons on who Jesus really was.  That’s what the Epiphany formally does.  But it doesn’t stop with the Magi. We have the baptism by John, the wedding feast at Cana, the walking on the water, and the many healing stories such as the one in Luke’s gospel when Jesus heals the leper (Luke 5:12-16).

With our individualist mindset we tend to think of illness (and healing) as something that affects primarily the individual, though often the family as well.  But the many stories of lepers and those suffering from convulsive disorders (like epilepsy), for example, illustrate another feature of illness.  The afflicted were literally marginalized.  People couldn’t have contact with them. Even to touch them made a person ritually impure. They were relegated to the outskirts of towns and villages, even to living in cemeteries.  To some extent, we still do something similar in our times.  Think of how we have marginalized AIDS victims.  In the not very distant past we sent people with tuberculosis to sanitaria. 

I don’t question the motives behind such practices, especially when we might not know what causes the conditions in some cases.  Rather I think about the marginalizing that is a feature of illness – one we too easily overlook today.  It is not just the person who is sick; it is the community that is, in a sense “broken” by the illness of one of its members.  Ill people make us uncomfortable.

We don’t much like being with them, except perhaps for a perfunctory “visit the sick” (as in the corporal works of mercy).  The healing of the afflicted individual restores the community to its wholeness.  Jesus was healing both.

By His actions in this story, as well as by His words throughout the gospels, Jesus is saying that there is no marginalizing in God’s view of how humanity ought to order its affairs.  Luke makes a point of saying Jesus touched the leper, a man “full of leprosy”.  That very touch brings the sufferer back into the community from which he had been excluded.  Notice, in other healing stories, that Jesus looks the sufferer in the eye, speaks to him/her by name, and touches – almost always touches.

That’s the God who is revealed to us in these Epiphany feasts.

After people heard about how Jesus miraculously cured the leper, He was besieged with crowds following Him, to listen and be cured.  But we are told that He withdrew to deserted places to pray.  Why?

Certainly it couldn't have been that He didn't want to have people listen to Him or that He didn't want to cure people, and certainly it would seem He was always in the presence of the Father and the Spirit. Why then did He withdraw to pray? 

It seems that there is more to it than just giving us an example of the need to pray; important and helpful though His example was.  Could it have been that while on earth, Jesus really felt exiled, and not just wanted, but needed, the unity of the Father and the Holy Spirit, which could only be achieved through the practice of prayer?

So, He gives us an example of what is absolutely necessary!  Unity!  Not only is the Trinity meant to be undivided; we, too, as the Body of Christ are meant to be undivided in unity with the Trinity.

Words matter. Just as God’s words of creation took flesh in light, stars, seas, dry land, animals and humans, and just as the very Word of God became flesh here on earth, our words also take on flesh.  Unfortunately, sometimes the words of bullies take on flesh with disastrous results, even suicides, of those bullied.  Other times a word of healing or compassion actually brings healing and compassion.  Words of hope actually bring hope. The way we talk to ourselves, the way we talk to and about others, the way we talk to and about God – it all matters.

This might be why during every single Marian apparition approved by the Church, our Blessed Mother asked us to pray the rosary.  We begin with the prayer that is the Apostle’s Creed, which professes our faith in the Trinity in a nutshell.  Then as we meditate on Jesus’ life through the Mysteries of our faith, we begin each Mystery with an Our Father and end each Mystery with the Glory Be.  Can’t be much more in unity with the Trinity than that, this side of Heaven!

Therefore, we must go forth like Jesus and with Jesus to that deserted place within, to pray and so be with the Father and the Spirit.  It’s not something that's just nice to do, but something essential to do, as Jesus taught and as His mother reminds us.