for July 6
Monday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

Today’s readings are about faith and faithlessness. The Gospel presents us with two people whose rock-solid faith brought healing while the first reading from the prophet Hosea offers a poignant picture of God’s response to an abandoned faith. 

In the Gospel passage, both the synagogue leader whose daughter has just died and the woman with the hemorrhage turn to Jesus completely trusting in his healing power. Their faith is both in the possibility of healing in seemingly hopeless cases and in Jesus as the healer. The woman has been suffering for twelve years (Mark and Luke add that she’s been going to doctors to no avail) but she believes she only needs to touch Jesus’s cloak to be cured. It is a faith in Jesus as a man imbued with the power of God. The tassel she touches is one of four (called tzitzit) traditionally attached by Jews to a garment and knotted in a particular way as a continual reminder of God. Jesus affirms that “your faith has saved you.” With the synagogue leader’s daughter, Jesus’s power is emphasized by his delay in going to the child due to his interaction with the woman. By the time he gets to the girl’s house, the mourners have already arrived. This time it is Jesus who reaches out to the one needing healing and, as with the woman, with one touch she is restored to life. The power of God to heal flows through Jesus into those who are open to it.

Following on the heels of the prophet Amos, whom we read last week, Hosea in the first reading echoes many of the same warnings, but he brings to them the passion of a personal anguish. Hosea married a prostitute named Gomer who kept breaking his heart by not being faithful to him. Yet he continued to love her fervently and yearned for her to give up her philandering ways and return to him. He came to feel that his experience of Gomer turning to other men mirrored that of God when Jews turned to worshipping the god Baal. Hosea’s metaphor of Israel as an unfaithful wife is a powerful image of both the intimacy of God’s relationship with his people and of God’s love and care for us. As Hosea repeatedly forgave Gomer, so God not only forgives us when we stray but actively, tenderly strives to entice us back. The marital imagery stresses the reciprocity of the bond between God and Israel, especially the mutual love that, from the human side, may wane but may also be rekindled.

Taken together, these two readings express the two primary aspects of God as powerful, praiseworthy, and exalted on the one hand and gentle, compassionate, and humbly residing in our hearts on the other. The psalm brings them together. The “unsearchable greatness” of God, “the splendor of his glorious majesty,” and “the power of his terrible deeds” coexist with his “abundant goodness,” his justice and graciousness, and his compassion. 

And in Jesus all of God coexists with a fully human person. We may stray, we may doubt, but the faith that will save us is acknowledging that we need healing and opening ourselves to the Lord’s mercy.
—Christine Szczepanowski

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website.