Archbishop’s Journal: Seeing with eyes of faith in Jesus Christ

• June 28, 2009

Common sense has a good reputation. For example, most people agree, especially after the events of these last nine months, that this saying is correct: "If a business deal sounds too good to be true, it's probably because it is!" But common sense has its limits. For example you can see with your eyes that the sun rises each morning and sets each evening, so it's common sense to conclude that the sun moves around the earth. However, Galileo proved that the opposite is true: the earth revolves around the sun. Still, old common sense conclusions die slowly: more than three hundred years after Galileo, people still don't refer to "earth turn;" instead they refer to "sunrise" and "sunset." It still seems to people that the sun moves around the earth. That's what it looks like. It just isn't true.

In today's story from the Gospel of Mark there are several examples of mistaken common sense. As we hear about Jesus curing the woman with the hemorrhage and his raising of the daughter of Jairus from the dead, we see examples of a struggle between common sense (common prejudice, really) and the risk of faith in Jesus Christ. For instance, Jairus is a synagogue official, probably a Pharisee, but he still falls to his feet and begs Jesus to cure his daughter, apparently not caring what other people will think. The woman with the hemorrhage has given up on doctors, but she goes against common sense by refusing to stay home; she takes the risk of embarrassing herself by putting her trust in a traveling healer, Jesus. The woman is cured, and Jesus tells her it is not some "magic" in touching him or his garment, but the power of her faith that has healed her.

The friends of Jairus sound like they have a lot of common sense; they tell him, "Your daughter is dead. Why bother the teacher further?" But the teacher, Jesus, tells Jairus: "Fear is useless. What is needed is trust." Then Jesus tells the mourners at the house of Jairus that the child is not dead, just asleep, and they laugh at him. They have common sense after all. Finally, at the end of the story, we get a good example of common sense: Jesus takes the little girl by the hand, gives her to her parents, and tells them to give her something to eat. Children are almost always hungry.

This struggle between common prejudices ("what everybody knows") and faith in the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ goes on all the time in our lives as Catholic Christians. For instance, there's lots of evil and death in the world, so common sense tells us that God must have created it. However, our first reading, from the Book of Wisdom in the Old Testament, tells us: "God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For God formed man to be imperishable . . . But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, . . ."

A common piece of wisdom is that each of us should take care of Number One, our own self, because nobody else is going to. However, St. Paul the Apostle, patron of this parish, whose special Year of St. Paul will end tomorrow, teaches us in our second reading that we should not put ourselves at the center of our lives. Instead, Paul urges us to consider what Jesus did for us, and then let that teach us how to treat others in our lives. St. Paul says: "You are well acquainted with the favor shown you by our Lord Jesus Christ: how for your sake he made himself poor, though he was rich, so that you might become rich by his poverty." Paul means that the divine Son of God became human like us and for us, so that by his life, his death on the Cross and his resurrection we might be freed from the slavery of sin and death and share in his life now and forever. In gratitude, Paul teaches, we should use any surplus of this world's goods to help other who are more needy than ourselves.

St. Paul was the Apostle to the Gentiles, the great first preacher of the Gospel to all peoples of all nations. He proclaimed the Good News that we can all be saved by faith in Jesus Christ, and by putting that faith to work in our daily lives.

The Gospel as proclaimed by Jesus Christ, and then taught by St. Paul, teaches many things that are the opposite of common wisdom or prejudice: advice like "Don't get mad, get even" must yield to turning the other cheek, to forgiving people and giving them another chance, just as God forgives us, and just as we pray for each time we say the Our Father. For us followers of Jesus Christ, all kinds of prejudices in the world around us have to give way to God's love for all his children, of every race or religion or economic status.

In his letters, St. Paul is constantly challenging us to move beyond what "everybody says" and what "everybody thinks" and what "everybody does." We need to look at reality with the eyes of faith in Christ and not only with the eyes just above our noses. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody does it, and right is right, even if nobody does it.

St. Paul was the first Christian teacher to describe in writing Christ's gift to his Church of the Eucharist, his own Body and Blood. Even before the four Gospels, St. Paul, writing in his First Letter to the Corinthians around 57 A.D., tells us about the Last Supper and the Lord's Supper in Eucharist, where we must look with the eyes of faith and see in the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Just as the eyes of science can help us see past sunrise and sunset, so the eyes of faith can help us see Jesus Christ in Eucharist and see him in all people. That is the teaching us Jesus: if we reach out to the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the imprisoned, the homeless and the stranger, we reach out to Christ himself. And when we turn away from them, we turn away from Jesus Christ.

So we have choices to make. We can respond to situations in life like Jairus's friends, telling him it's common sense to give up, or like the mourners at his house, laughing at the teacher who pretends that the dead girl is just asleep. Or, we can look at people and situations with the eyes of faith and take the risk of faith. Not every sick person is healed and not every dead child comes back to life.

That is good sense. However, Jesus Christ died and was raised so that everyone - the sick and the healthy, the dead and the living - everyone, might have life with him here and life with him forever. That's not common sense; that's the faith of Christians everywhere, and it's true.

Marking the end of the "Year of St. Paul," San Francisco Archbishop George H. Niederauer delivered this homily June 28, 2009 at St. Paul's Church in San Francisco.

From July 10, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.