Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

A Benedictine Monk tells of how he looks at the bulletin board every morning before prayer. The items he pays the most attention to are the requests for prayers. They come from all over and are about almost everything. There is a regular "prayer client" who mentions various intentions. One time, in her list, she mentioned the need for prayers for someone seriously ill. The following day, she left a message saying, "No need to pray for so and so; he's already dead."We Catholics pray for both the living and the dead. In the incident of the woman who told the monks not to pray for the person who had died, there is a common thread with today's Gospel. There is Jairus, who didn't hesitate to pray for his daughter's healing. Upon arriving at the house, the people told him not to bother Jesus any longer because the girl had died. But Jesus told the father, "Do not be afraid; just have faith." He continued to express his faith in Jesus, and his daughter was raised to life. Jesus performed a miracle with the faith of the Jairus.

God's word for us today helps us to examine specific aspects of our faith relationship with the Lord.

The first aspect is that the way to healing in Jesus is through faith in Him. We express our faith in our prayers. Jairus was not discouraged and kept hoping against hope, even with the death of his daughter, that his prayers would be answered. To the realistic but discouraging remarks of the people on the girl's condition, Jesus kept inspiring him, telling him to just have faith. In our relationship with God, faith paves the way for healing.

The second aspect would be to look at death, again, from the perspective of the Christian faith. Some of us could relate concrete stories of extraordinary healing even when dying. But most of us know that although our ailing loved one did not recover and now rests in peace, we still believe in the Lord; we still believe that, on a different level, our departed loved ones have indeed been raised to new life.

In our first reading today, we heard that God's strongest desire for us is life. It isn't that God created us to be immortal like Him; we are mortal. But there are two kinds of death: physical death and spiritual death.

We experience the physical death at the end of our lease of life. But we may still be physically alive while having experienced spiritual death.

Through the Resurrection of Jesus, we know and believe that beyond physical death, there is eternal life with God by our faith in Christ. Yet what the devil aims at in this life is our spiritual death, our separation from God while we are still alive. It is the more dangerous death we can experience and must guard ourselves against. It is in this death of our spirit that the devil wants to possess us. With bodily ailments, both kinds of death are possible. We may die if the illness turns deadly serious. But we could also be spiritually dead as we begin to despair, distrust the Lord, and refuse His offer of a more excellent life. Illness can turn us away from God but can also lead to greater faith in the Lord. Jairus's faith led to a new life for his child. He serves as a model of living in faith.

May our prayer today, and always, be for spiritual life and the hope that that life can be renewed – even resurrected – by our faith in Jesus and our hope against hope that Jesus can always fill us with His powerful love – in this life and the next.