Author: MtCarmel

Reflection on the Gospel – 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B
Veronica Lawson RSM

Mark 5:21-43

In Mark’s gospel, we often find a story within a story. Some scholars refer to this technique as the making of a Markan sandwich, others as a framing device. In Mark 5:21-43, the frame consists of the two-part story of the desperately ill twelve year old daughter of Jairus, a synagogue official. Jairus falls at the feet of Jesus in an attitude of reverence and pleads with him to come and lay hands on her. Jesus is clearly known as a healer, one who can ‘save’ life. The passage closes with the young woman’s seeming death and restoration to life. In between, we have the story of an older woman, also seriously ill, possibly with a gynaecological problem: she has been haemorrhaging for twelve years.

The stories are linked in many ways, first by the repetition of the number twelve-a symbolic number in a Jewish context. Both the young Jewish woman and the older Jewish woman are in need of the saving power of God mediated through Jesus the healer. Later in the Markan story [7:24-30) a Gentile mother and daughter will beg for and receive that same saving power of God. Jairus’ daughter does not speak for herself. Like all young women of that culture, ill or not, she is dependent on the voice of her father. The older woman comes tentatively ‘from behind’. She speaks, but only to herself as she touches Jesus’ cloak and experiences healing in her body. She is finally shamed into telling all. Like Jairus, she falls at the feet of Jesus. Jairus refers to his little girl on the brink of adulthood as ‘my daughter’. Jesus addresses the older woman as ‘my daughter’.

Both women, the younger and the older, are daughters of Israel. Both are restored to health, one on account of her parents’ faith (the unnamed mother and the named father], the other because of her own faith. Jesus the healer has embraced and responded to the pain of a woman alone on the one hand and of a family (mother, father, and daughter) on the other.

Towards the end of the gospel (14:3-9), this Jesus who has brought healing to little children, to older women and younger women, to older men and younger men, to Jews and to Gentiles, will himself become the recipient of the healing ministry of an insightful woman who pours out healing ointment. He will recognise this action as a beautiful thing that she has done ‘in him’. For now, the stories recount ‘the beautiful thing’ he does in the lives of suffering humanity, irrespective of age or gender or status or ethnicity.

Due to lack of attendance, the prayers of the church will not proceed on Wednesday nights.

Reflection on the Gospel – Birth of John the Baptist
Veronica Lawson RSM

Luke 1:5-17 (Vigil); Luke 1:57-66, 80 (Daytime)

What are you doing for the Year of Grace? I have heard that question time and again over the past few weeks. The response of a young woman friend stays with me: “I plan to be gracious all the time, even in the face of hostility, or perhaps especially in the face of hostility.” Her whole being spoke to me of graciousness. She plans to live in the spirit of today’s feast, the feast of the birth of a herald of grace.

The reading for the vigil tells of the angelic announcement of the birth of John the Baptist.  The gospel writer locates John in relation to time and place and lineage. He is born in the days of Herod of Judea. Both parents are named. Both are of priestly descent. Both are ‘righteous’ before God. They are elderly and childless. Their childless state is attributed to Elizabeth’s barrenness, as one might expect in a pre-scientific age.

Zechariah is performing his priestly service in the Jerusalem Temple when the angel appears to him and announces that his ‘prayer has been heard’. Elizabeth is to bear a son whose birth will bring ‘joy’ and ‘gladness’, not only to his parents, but to ‘many’. This child, who is to be named ‘John’, will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before his birth. His mission is to ‘turn’ people to God and to engender in them a state of preparedness. The urgency of his mission is conveyed by the reiteration of the notion of ‘make ready’ and ‘prepare’.

John’s name receives some prominence in the Lukan account of the announcement of birth and of the events following his birth. Contrary to the expectations of family and friends, this child is not to be named after his father. He is to have the name that God’s messenger has announced to Zechariah. The Hebrew form of John, from which the Greek of the gospel is derived, means literally ‘God [YHWH] has graced’ or ‘God [YHWH] has given grace’. Elizabeth will insist that the child is to be called ‘John’. Her intervention is juxtaposed with the narrator’s comment about God’s ‘great mercy’ towards her in giving her this child. Zechariah finds his lost voice at this moment and uses it to confirm Elizabeth’s word, implicitly demonstrating the grace of God at work in her.

God’s grace and mercy towards Jerusalem and its people are linked in Israel’s psalms: ‘You will rise up and have mercy on Zion, for it is time to grace it’ (Ps 102:13). John’s birth signals the outpouring of God’s grace and mercy on God’s people. ‘What then will this child be?’ is the people’s question concerning John. We have the benefit of an answer to that question from the lips of the Lukan Jesus:  ‘A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet (Luke 7:26).”