When we think of being healthy, it is more than just not being sick. As one author put it,
“The word in Hebrew which refers to being healthy is shalem, which means to be whole, complete, or sound. The related term is more familiar to us: the noun shalom, "peace." Just as peace in Hebrew means more than the absence of war, so health means more than the absence of illness. In both cases, what is at issue is becoming whole, whether individually (in the case of health) or socially (in the case of peace).” (Bruce Chilton)
Wholeness and healing are deeply connected.
What we are experiencing now with Covid-19 is so many people being separated from that wholeness. And of course, we are asking why now with this virus and as we so often do, we want to lay blame at someone’s feet…
The disciples were thinking about the why question when they encountered a man blind from birth.
His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work…"
Too often, when something happens, we point the finger. It was that person’s sin that caused the calamity to come upon them. You hear it especially after a terrible tragedy when someone will say it is God’s way of punishing them/us for sin. We are hearing it again with this pandemic.
But in the response from Jesus to his disciples, it reminds us that this is not how God works. God did not make the man blind because of sin, but through what has happened, God’s works may be revealed in him.
No one is defective, or throw a way, or a mistake. God has made each of us, and through the God given gifts we have, God’s works may be revealed through us.
And then Jesus heals the man. His sight is restored. He is made whole again and part of the community. He believes in Jesus. But others became blind, they could not see the good done by Jesus. He broke the rules. He upset how things should be.
Jesus didn’t come to make things nice. He came to set us free. So the blind see. That communities are made whole. That healing is done for us and our world. Sometimes we have to be at rock bottom, at the edge, starring at the abyss of a virus to fully understand this.
On Christmas Day 2011, Gary Gately was clutching the railing of Manhattan’s George Washington Bridge, staring into the cold, black waters of the Hudson River — and into the face of eternity. Depression, addiction, a marriage that disintegrated all drove him to the precipice.
But Gately did not jump off the bridge ten Christmases ago — and, to this day, he ponders why he didn’t.
For seven years Gary Gately kept the darkness of his depression to himself, save for family and close friends. But now, in the wake of our nation’s suicide epidemic, the award-winning Baltimore-based journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post has decided to tell his story. Suicides have surged 30 percent since 1999 and now claim an average of 202 Americans a day, more than two and a half times as many lives as homicides (that includes 20 veterans who die from suicide per day).
So what happened that made him climb down from the precipice that Christmas day — and what enables him to continue on, day after day?
Gately writes in America Magazine [November 11, 2019] that he thinks it was the “sunset, my son’s whispers echoing, I love you, Dad, and a ghost, that of an editor who died in 2010, Anne Zusy. Sunset over the Hudson paints Englewood Cliffs all oranges and crimsons and purples, and I just gaze at it, savoring the beauty of last light. Then I look to the Manhattan skyline, and my mind meanders to interning at The New York Times. I hear the voice of Annie, echoing through the decades. Annie, the editor who had hired me and mentored me and saved me so many times, is saying: ‘Look, don’t worry, O.K.? Have some fun. You’re not meant to be miserable. God loves you, and he wants you to be happy . . . ’
Gately writes that “only light can pierce this darkness, and only love can shine that light. That means people who care — even when you have given them every reason to conclude you cannot be saved — can reach you: family, friends, loved ones, a priest, a coach, a volunteer on a suicide hotline, a therapist who recognizes that you do not snap out of depression that makes you want to die but that there is a path out.
“Love is the answer. Nothing else could have saved me when I could no longer save myself. Others, their words, even words spoken decades ago, gave me enough hope to choose life over death.”
Perhaps the greater miracle in today’s Gospel is Jesus’ opening the vision of those around the blind man to recognize the presence of God in their midst. The light that is Christ should reveal his love and grace in every human heart; such light should illuminate the dark places and dispel the shadows that isolate us from the love of family and friends; through healing bring us into greater wholeness and community.
In this time of our social distancing and isolation, it is even more important that we spread that love through phone calls, texts, video calls, written notes, whatever way we can reach out …
This Lent may we dare to embrace the light of God reflected in his Christ and so become reflections of that light in the love and care we extend to the suffering, the support we offer to the troubled and despairing, our hearts always opened to those struggling to cope with life’s darkest moments of this pandemic. Amen.
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