13th Sunday 2021
Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; 2 Cor 8:7,9,13-15; Mark 5:21-43
I am going to tell you a story. It is about an Englishman, an Irishman, an Italian, and a Belgian, and the setting is the Grotto at Lourdes, a little over fifty years ago.
One afternoon, as a brancardier (literally, a stretcher bearer, but in reality, a general helper of the sick) I was on duty at the Grotto. Among the crowds was a young Italian woman on a stretcher, who was anxious to attract my attention. Not knowing any Italian, I called a bilingual Italian colleague, who ascertained that the young woman wanted to be taken through the Grotto, the scene of Our Lady’s apparitions.
Enlisting the help of a young Belgian soldier, and of an Irishman who was higher in the ranks of brancardiers, we wheeled the stretcher to the entrance to the Grotto, where we encountered an obstacle in the form of an official who, like the angel with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden, was barring the way. Apparently it wasn’t the done thing for a stretcher to be taken through the Grotto.
“Pas possible! Pas possible!” exclaimed this individual. The Irishman took charge. “Si, c’est possible!” he insisted—and please don’t tell me that he should have said “oui”, because I remember from O-level French that “yes”, when uttered as a contradiction, is “si”. Thereupon he moved away the barrier at the entrance, and the four of us, the Irishman, the Italian, the Belgian, and I, lifted the stretcher from its trolley, and carried it through the Grotto, the queuing pilgrims happily making way for us.
The young Italian woman reached out and touched the rock, and laughed and cried by turns. We replaced her stretcher on its trolley and went our separate ways.
Now, I suspect that there will be sophisticated people in the ranks of Holy Mother Church who will disapprove of that story. They will consider that processing through the Lourdes Grotto and touching the rock is mere superstition, unworthy of thinking Christians. I knew a woman, high in the ranks of Catholic educationalists, who boasted that she had never been to Lourdes, and that, driving past the end of the road leading to the shrine at Knock, she had carried on driving.
My mother would not have agreed with her; nor would Pope Francis; nor would St. John Henry Newman; nor would Jesus. When I brought home a rose leaf from Assisi, my mother assiduously applied it to her arthritic knee. Pope Francis, a thoroughly cultured Jesuit, has spoken repeatedly in favour of popular devotions. St. John Henry Newman, one of the greatest intellectual figures of the nineteenth century English speaking world, delivered a sermon in praise of the simple faith of the woman with a haemorrhage in today’s Gospel, who wanted to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, and Our Lord Himself blessed the Father for hiding the mysteries of the Kingdom from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.
Furthermore, when Jesus encountered the woman with the haemorrhage, He didn’t call her superstitious. He didn’t tell her to sort out her theological understanding. He said “Your faith has restored you to health. Go in peace, and be free of your complaint.”
Notice something else: the woman’s cure was as automatic as she believed it would be. Jesus didn’t actively cure her: it happened as a response to her faith. The woman was cured before Jesus was aware of it: St. Mark says that the Lord was aware that “power had gone out from Him”. It was a direct result of what the sophisticated would regard as the woman’s superstitious gesture.
Even Jesus Himself was effectively accused of superstition. He was laughed at, but He persisted in taking the hand of the dead girl and telling her to get up. Yet the simple faith of Jairus, the girl’s father, was sufficient, and Jesus was practical enough to remind the bystanders to feed her.
We have a responsibility to develop our understanding of the things of God, and to learn. God has given us an intellect to be developed, and we should use it in God’s service—but, as we gain a deeper intellectual understanding of our faith, let us never despise or lose the simplicity of the faith of the little ones to whom the Father has revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom.
