THE LORD HEALS THE BROKEN-HEARTED

V SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - Mark 1:29-39

Nobody passes through this world without being touched by the cold hand of pain and suffering. And whenever it touches us, we are made aware of our fragility and our mortality. Then, we realise that “life is but a breath” (Job 7:7), lasting a little while and no more. And that little while is filled with pain and suffering. In moments of joy, we may behave like the lords of the world to whom nothing seems impossible as if life is full of merriness. However, when suffering knocks at the door, all that enjoyment is no more than a faint memory. And then we ask time and again: Why? Why all this suffering? What have I done to be punished in this way?

We do not get used to suffering and we do not accept our mortality. In our quest for understanding, we may raise our hands and turn our eyes to heaven in an attitude of defiance or even of revolt. In such moments, it is good to read the book of Job. It is an extraordinary book, in which we can hear the cry of humanity: with an aching heart filled with anguish, we hear the questions being asked aloud - those eternal questions always mumbled in our hearts, for which we never find an appropriate answer.

Job has the audacity to stand before God and ask: Are you being fair? Do you take pleasure in my pain? If you are a good and merciful God, how can you allow such violence, injustice, suffering and anguish? Or did you create us for pain and death?

Time and again, humanity tries to silence the big questions and lives as if life is only for joy and pleasure.  We can even find preachers of a gospel of well-being and wealth in which God will be at our service, ready to satisfy all our desires. The book of Job compels us to look at the harsh reality of life lived here on earth. Pleasures are but a passing moment which leaves a bitter taste. Moments of incomplete happiness are followed by a hangover of malaise, anguish and (almost) despair. 

The questions of Job go on reverberating through all generations. In spite of the violence of an endless pain and of a life rushing towards death, we long for peace, happiness and the fullness of life. In Job, we can see a prophecy of Christ, who in his pain addressed God, crying out: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt 27, 46). On the cross, Jesus is the “man of sorrows”, whose life seems to be meaningless. In his wounds and in his pain, he looks like a cursed man, rejected by all, before whom God remained silent. In Jesus Christ, humanity experienced the anguish and the pain to the last. But death had not the last word on him. In fact, he passed through death to life, becoming a source of hope for all those who follow on his way. 

In the book of Job, at the end, we find him acknowledging God’s mystery, the mystery of a God whose plan for humanity is a plan of life not of death. And that is what Jesus Christ revealed to us by his words and by his actions. God is with us and on our side, when we pass through suffering and death, so that in him we may find resurrection and life.

In this Sunday liturgy, with the Psalm 147, we sing: 

“He heals the broken-hearted,

  he binds up all their wounds.” (Ps 147:3)

In his ministry to the sick and the poor, Jesus showed the compassionate face of God who listens to the cry of his people and feels their pain. Jesus Christ “took our sicknesses away, and carried our diseases for us.” (Mt 8:17 (Is 53:4)