REFLECTIONS ON THE HEALING OF A LEPER (Mk 1: 40-45) XI
Yesterday we affirmed that the activity of Jesus in his public ministry, his focus on preaching and the healing of the possessed and the sick, is the origin of the centrality that the Word of God and the Sacraments have in the life of the Church. The Lord has come to save us. Our salvation consists in communion with Christ that develops into a life of holiness, of charity lived to a heroic degree, of generous dedication to God in our brothers and sisters. At the origin of that divine life is the Word of God and the Sacraments.
"Non est enim aliud Dei sacramentum nisi Christus. There is no other sacrament but Christ.” This affirmation of St. Augustine may be striking at first sight, especially for us Catholics who always speak of the 7 sacraments. The term "sacrament" is Latin and translates the Greek word “misterion”, mystery. Without going into too much detail, in Sacred Scripture this word refers to the saving plan of God that was hidden and was manifested by Jesus. This is expressed, for example, by St. Paul at the end of the letter to the Romans (16: 25-26): “Glory to God, who has the power to strengthen them, according to the Good News that I announce, proclaiming Jesus Christ, and revealing a mystery that was kept secret from eternity and has now been revealed! ”
Jesus is the sacrament par excellence because if the sacraments are signs that reveal a deeper reality, the humanity of the Lord allows us to see the mystery of God. No one had ever seen God: it was the only Son who made him known to us. (Jn 1:18) As Jesus tells his disciple Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.“ (Jn 14: 9) St. Paul writes that Christ is "the image of the invisible God". (Col 1:15) As one of the prefaces of Christmas affirms in a most beautiful way, the Word was incarnated in the womb of Mary so that we could visibly know God who, until then, was invisible.
It is the humanity of the Son of God that gives rise to the Church and its sacraments. In the face of the Lord, we see God. In the Lord's words, we learn the secrets of divine wisdom. In the works of Jesus, God's love for man is manifested to us.
Therefore, Jesus Christ is the only Sacrament in the sense that in his humanity we see the mystery of God manifested in its fullness.
From this perspective, we must look at each of the Lord's gestures. He is the Word made flesh; therefore each movement of his body is a manifestation of the infinite love of God for man. Each one of his actions makes visible an infinite and invisible reality, that of divine mercy. This is particularly evident in the Lord's cures. As Pope Benedict XVI recalls in his book, "Jesus of Nazareth" (Chapter VI), the healing miracles of Christ are essentially signs. Signs of what? Signs of the redemptive work, of God's love for man, of God's liberating power over the forces of nature and the powers of evil.
In most of the cases in which Jesus heals someone, we find some kind of gesture and each one of those gestures has a meaning that with the guidance of the Church and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are all called to discover. Let's repeat: the Lord works his miracles, in almost all cases, by physically touching sick people, thus expressing that his body is a channel of grace. We recall the woman who touches the hem of his cloak (Mk 5:27), the blind man whose eyes he smears with mud and saliva (Jn 9), the daughter of Jairus who he takes by the hand (Mk 5:41), the deaf man whose ears and the tongue he touches (Mk 7, 31-37) and the leper Jesus deliberately touches to heal him (Mk 1, 20-45), the healing we will contemplate together.
We will finish this reflection tomorrow, but how can we not see in these signs used by Jesus Christ in his healings, those other signs that perpetuate in history the healing, miraculous and life-giving power of the Lord? How can we not see in the use that Jesus makes of the gestures of his body and in the use of material realities, the sacraments he left his Church, which use the same realities and the same gestures to communicate the grace of salvation to men of all times?
Let us ask the Lord to help us participate in the sacraments with living faith, so that they can work in us the same miracles and healing that he brought into the lives of the people he touched: healing in their bodies and eternal life to their souls.
