Gospel of 23 March 2020
Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent
John 4:43-54
Go home: your son will live
Jesus left Samaria for Galilee. He himself had declared that there is no respect for a prophet in his own country, but on his arrival the Galileans received him well, having seen all that he had done at Jerusalem during the festival which they too had attended.
He went again to Cana in Galilee, where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a court official there whose son was ill at Capernaum and, hearing that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judaea, he went and asked him to come and cure his son as he was at the point of death. Jesus said, ‘So you will not believe unless you see signs and portents!’ ‘Sir,’ answered the official ‘come down before my child dies.’ ‘Go home,’ said Jesus ‘your son will live.’ The man believed what Jesus had said and started on his way; and while he was still on the journey back his servants met him with the news that his boy was alive. He asked them when the boy had begun to recover. ‘The fever left him yesterday’ they said ‘at the seventh hour.’ The father realised that this was exactly the time when Jesus had said, ‘Your son will live’; and he and all his household believed.
This was the second sign given by Jesus, on his return from Judaea to Galilee.
Reflexion
‘So you will not believe unless you see signs and portents!’ Sounds like a harsh rebuke and it becomes stranger when it is addressed to one who already possesses faith in the Lord; for he wouldn’t be seeking a cure if he didn’t believe Jesus could do it.
To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s recall what he was asking, and you will see that his faith was not that perfect. This official asked Jesus earnestly to come down and heal his son. He was asking for the physical presence of the Lord. He may have thought that Jesus, just like a magician, needed to be physically present to work His magic. If he had believed completely he would have known that there was no place where God was not present and where God could not work.
But the Lord revealed that He was not absent from the place He was invited to. For Jesus is both fully man and fully God. If man is limited by time and space, God does not possess such limitations. In fact, there is nothing which can confine, impede or restrain the presence and power of God. He chose to be one of us in time and space, and yet He exists outside time and space whilst being the Lord of time and space, the Alpha and the Omega. And so Christ, could heal this boy, Christ could heal anyone for that matter without choosing to be physically present. But Christ being God, can also freely choose to be present in a most real and physical way.
We Catholics, unlike our Protestant brethren, have always asserted that our faith in Christ presence is not just confined to the spiritual realm. We do not say, “Yes Christ is present, He is present in spirit but not in person.” Since His ascension into heaven, we do not speak of Him as just continuing to work from a distance or confine his work to that of the Holy Spirit. All that is true, but there is so much more.
Although our Lord does not need to be physically present to heal us, to guide us and to save us, He has chosen to do so. His presence is real, it is tangible, it is substantial, it is for all purposes a true presence. Not just symbolic and make-believe.
As Catholics, we firmly believe that the real presence of Christ is in the Holy Eucharist. And that is why the Church refers to the Holy Eucharist as the source and summit of the whole Christian life.
Jesus did not just give to the apostles at the Last Supper blessed bread and wine, mere symbolic memorials of His presence, as if they were some form of souvenir. He was giving His whole life– Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. He was giving His very self.
So here’s the irony, Jesus did not have to be physically present to bring healing to the official’s son, but Jesus chooses to be physically present to us in the Eucharist to give us eternal life.
A recent survey done in the United States tells us that less than one third of Catholics believe in the real presence of the Eucharist. I’m not sure what percentage of Catholics in Malaysia share similar beliefs but it is safe to say, that many do not really fully appreciate the full significance of this Catholic truth - that our Lord Jesus is truly, really, substantially present in the Eucharist, both soul and divinity. We can, however, surmise this from the often lack of reverence we witness among Catholics in churches and before the Blessed Sacrament, the almost careless and callous way we receive holy communion, the lack of appreciation for the need of being properly disposed and in a state of grace when we receive holy communion. We can deduce the last point from the small numbers that actually go to confession.
Perhaps, the suspension of public masses may cause harm to the faith of many, and that is why we need to encourage each other to pray, to spend time reading the Word of God, to perform other devotions. Without these aids, and denied of sacramental grace for too long, I fear our spiritual lives will wither. But then this presents a greater opportunity to re-evangelise. To start all over again with a fresh impetus for mission!
But I also suspect that the suspension of masses may also serve to restore a greater appreciation of the Eucharist as Real Presence, for as the expression goes, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Easy access to Christ’s real presence before the shut down may have led to the opposite effect, “familiarity breeds contempt.”
May this time of fasting from holy communion be a penitential period to make reparation for the sacrilege and casual contempt committed against the Holy Eucharist, when we took it for granted. And may this time be a time for our faith in the real presence be restored, for as the early Martyrs would declare, “how can we live without our Sunday’s (Eucharist)”.
But even now if you are denied of Our Lord’s physical sacramental presence for a short while, know and believe as the desperate father in the gospel believed, Christ still works among us and within us, and nothing, absolutely nothing can limit His reach and power. Amen.