“I always hated that Gospel.”
Eighty-year-old Helena was never one to sugarcoat her thoughts or feelings, so her comment didn’t necessarily shock me that humid summer afternoon as we awaited her Paratransit bus outside St. Elizabeth’s Church following Sunday Mass.
When I asked why, Helena didn’t hold back: “Why did that woman get healed and not me? What am I not doing right?”
You could hear the hurt, the anger and the frustration in her voice, the voice of a woman who has known deep and prolonged suffering for decades. Living alone in a substandard nursing care facility with no family to visit her and confined to a wheelchair since she was in her 40s, Helena still made every effort to attend Mass each week – as long as the aides dressed her in time and the DART bus actually showed up.
It was clear that she loved the Lord and that her Catholicism was part of the very air she breathed. And yet, under the surface, there existed the woundedness of one who sought answers to prayers that never seemed to come her way. “Why not me?”
So often, we hear this Gospel of Jairus’ daughter and the hemorrhaging woman from the perspective of faith-filled perseverance: a young girl on the cusp of womanhood brought back to life because her father didn’t give-up pleading her cause before God; an older woman shunned and ashamed because of her unclean blood-flow bold enough to touch the hem of Jesus, knowing that in so doing, she would cause him to become ritually unclean, too, according to Mosaic Law.
Perseverance-in-faith brought both of these women healing, either through the intercession of someone else or the trusting outreach of one suffering under the weight of her own cross. Both acts brought back life – physically, emotionally, spiritually and societally. Both acts give credence to the words from the Book of Wisdom (our first reading): “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”
And we walk away from hearing Mark’s Gospel with the message: Don’t stop believing. Ask, seek and knock continuously. Persevere.
In and of itself, this is not bad advice. Our loving God wants to be in relationship with us; He longs to hear our hearts and share in our fears, our anxieties, our sorrows and our pain. He wants us to come to Him, as a trusting child runs to a loving parent who will always be there to comfort, protect and guide.
But what happens when the child keeps running to a parent who remains silent? What happens when the persevering-ask seems to always fall on deaf ears?
Or as Helena said to me that afternoon upon hearing this very same Gospel: “Why that woman and not me? What am I not doing right with God? Why doesn’t Jesus heal me?”
Helena's not alone in that question.
How many of us have gone to Him, day after day, year after year, crying out for healing, and it never seems to come?
How many of us touch the hem of his garment through receiving the Eucharist, and yet we still carry our crosses of disability, cancer and pain?
How many of us continue to bleed-out, so to speak: the flow of broken dreams and hearts? The pouring out of endless tears of sadness?
How many have watched hopes and relationships and careers die before our very eyes, and no one comes to revive them?
Like Helena, we ask ourselves and our God: why them, Lord, and not me? I don't know. We may never know until we return to Him.
But this one thing I know is true: God's purpose is being fulfilled in the silent "no" and the cross that will not be taken away from you.
It hurts, yes. It's exhausting and heartbreaking. Anger sometimes clouds our vision and affects our relationship with God. He understands. He's not a Father who wants to see his children beg. Nor is he a God who loves to watch us suffer. That's not God.
But He is a God who uses everything we offer, and transforms the crosses and struggles we lift up and give back to Him. It is these very things which bring us back to Him in more profound and self-emptying ways.
I sometimes wonder if the hemorrhaging woman and grieving father didn't suffer in such ways, would they have even sought-out Jesus? Would they have known Him when they came upon Him? Furthermore, had the cross not been carried in such ways, would they even have found their true selves?
Suffering and tragedy in whatever way it comes has a way of revealing our true selves, the unique and beautiful souls God made us to be. Suffering offered back to God and united to His Cross shapes our hearts to be like His. We find our authentic identity in the One who first journeyed to Calvary out of love for us.
I have no doubt that the father who awaited his daughter's resurrection and the woman who longed for bodily and societal wholeness became persons who weren't afraid to walk with others who carried crosses, too. Because of their journey to Christ in the waiting and the heartache, they become other Christ's.
And none of it would have happened if their journey wasn't what it was.
Sometimes, for God, "no" and "not yet" are the most beautiful responses to our prayer requests, especially if we believe we were made for Him alone ... if we truly trust we are called to sainthood.
None of this necessarily fully answers why God seems to honor some healing requests and not others.
And yet if my friend Helena's life has been any indication: when I visit her in her nursing home, she is always the one -- and sometimes the only one -- who can be found comforting those around her who suffer greatly, too.
God's "no" to Helena's continual prayer has made her love like Him. Her cross has actually set her free.
It's certainly okay to "hate" this Gospel, but have no doubt: God uses everything -- especially the waiting and the seemingly closed doors to healing -- to help us find our way back Home to Him.