for June 27
Saturday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

For most of this past week, the first readings have come from the second book of Kings, and they are a catalog of destruction. The land of God’s chosen people has been conquered and laid waste, and all but the poorest inhabitants have been dragged off to exile in Babylon. Finally, in today’s first reading, we arrive at a lament—a prayer that is an outpouring of grief over all that is so very wrong and a plea for things to be made right.

Like many people, I am pretty familiar with (and capable of) whining and ranting, but lamentation is a less familiar practice. What’s the difference? As in today’s first reading,  lamentation is unstinting in its description of pain, suffering and evil (like ranting). But lament (unlike whining) does not evade responsibility; blame is assigned and change demanded. Lamentation is rooted in a relationship and it has expectations. Lamentation does not cry “I have been abandoned” but “Why have you abandoned me?” Even as lamentation calls out for healing, it knows where healing can be found: cry out to the Lord, we hear today, pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. 

Which brings us to the miracles of today’s gospel, the second and third episodes of Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as a powerful healer. After the Sermon on the Mount (the last of which we heard in Wednesday’s gospel), Matthew turns his attention from Jesus as a powerful teacher to Jesus as doer of mighty works. The first example came in yesterday’s story of a leper made ‘clean’; in today’s gospel, a centurion’s servant and Peter’s mother-in-law are healed.

The centurion’s recognition of Jesus’s authority echoes Matthew’s closing commentary on the Sermon on the Mount—that Jesus taught with unique and compelling authority—and expresses similar confidence in his power to heal. The leper and Peter’s mother-in-law were healed by a touch of Jesus’s hand. For the centurion’s servant, it is Jesus’s word alone that is efficacious; the servant is healed even in Jesus’s absence.

This makes a powerful juxtaposition with the first reading. Taken together, today’s readings  recall us to faith in God’s power to heal, a power that remains even when it is hidden by despair over our circumstances. God desires our wholeness, an end to the suffering that surrounds us. In Peter’s mother-in-law, we get a glimpse of the appropriate response to such healing; she rose (the same word, scholars tell us, used for Jesus’s resurrection) and served Jesus.

How the centurion makes his request on his servant’s behalf is very familiar to us. We know it from the words we pray right before Communion. Remembering when this petition was first made might re-orient that prayer a bit for us. Perhaps the centurion’s words can be recited,  not so much an expression of our unworthiness, but as an assertion of our hope, of our firm knowledge that a word from God—the Word of God—can reach across anything that leads us to despair, to heal us.
—BJ Brown 

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