Lord, if You wish....

"Lord, if you wish ..."  (Matthew 8:1-4)   This was a great Gospel reading to reflect on!

What is it that you wish the Lord would do for you?  We all have our wish-lists.  We incorporate them into our prayer times, we post them at prayer request websites, we detail them to friends who give us prayer support.  

In our arrogance (or stupidity), we believe that we know how God should answer our prayers.  We think we're smart enough to know that right now is the best time for God to give us exactly what we desire. But do we really want Him to be as blind and stupid as we are?  Do we really want Him to be limited by our requests?

Or do we prefer that He take charge of the entire situation, with free reign to be sovereign over all elements and every ramification of our prayers?

God does give us miracles.  God can make it happen fast.  But how wonderful it is to know that He doesn't work according to our demands!  We should be elated that He's not a magic genie whom we can control and cajole and coerce.

When we approach the Lord in prayer, when we approach Him in the Eucharist, when we approach Him in the people we meet and deal with every day, if our attitude is one of homage, there’s always a miracle that takes place.  It's first of all the miracle of supernatural intimacy with the God of life, the God of the universe, the God of eternity, the God of all power and knowledge and goodness and love.

Jesus often would tell those who were healed to tell no one.  One reason for this, I think, was that Jesus’ acts of love and mercy weren’t done for His own benefit; rather, they were done out of love.  Jesus loved the leper in this Gospel and wanted to offer Him this precious gift of healing.  He did it out of compassion and, in return, only wanted the man’s gratitude.  He didn’t need to make this a public spectacle.  He only wanted the man to be grateful.

The same is true with us.  We need to know that God loves us so much that He wants to lift our heavy burdens and heal our weaknesses simply because He loves us.  He doesn’t do it first because it will benefit Him; rather, He does it out of love for us.

One lesson we can learn from this has to do with our own acts of love and mercy toward others.  When we go out of our way to show love and compassion, are we OK with no one knowing?  Too often we want to be noticed and praised.  But the nature of an act of love and compassion is such that it should be done simply out of love.  In fact, doing something loving and compassionate that isn’t noticed by anyone helps us grow in love and compassion.  It purifies our intentions and enables us to love for love’s sake.

In this time of economic and social unrest, when so many are sick and dying, when whole communities feel left out or worse, we need to cry out to the Lord.  And we will surely hear Him say, “Of course I want to heal you.”  But we first must know what we truly want and then make our plea to Jesus.