WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE?

A SERMON FOR THE 11th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

If you read between the lines of today’s Gospel, we will find a rather sad commentary on human nature.  As Our Lord approaches the town of Decapolis, his reputation apparently precedes him.  The crowds rush out to see this man who works miracles.   They are excited because they have heard he can perform wonders, and like children at a birthday party, they want to see the magician perform his tricks for them.  And so when they present to Our Lord “one that was deaf and had an impediment to his speech”, we must suspect that it is not so much out of compassion for this poor afflicted man, but rather that they are motivated by curiosity and simple thrill-seeking.

Nevertheless, Our Lord cures the man.  True, he first looks up to heaven and sighs, making us wonder if he too is perhaps exasperated by the attitude of the crowd.  But he does heal the deaf-mute all the same, to the gratitude of the poor man, and the frenzied delight of the crowd.  “Tell no man about this”, Our Lord admonishes them.  “But the more he charged them,” says the Gospel, “so much the more they published it.”  They just couldn’t hold their tongues, but had to go around buzzing the latest big news, “Did you hear what just happened?”

If Our Lord lived today, and performed miracles here in Cincinnati, would we see the conversion of hundreds of thousands? Would we see a religious revival with empty churches refilled, long lines in front of the confessionals, crowds gathering to recite the Rosary?  Given the attitude of the people in today’s Gospel, and worse yet of the people in the world today, I think not.  We see the local news anchors broadcasting their live reports, the crowds going wild and taking selfies with the Messiah on their iPhones, teenage girls fainting in delirium, and the same whoops of delight that they showed in Decapolis all those many years ago.  After all, we live in a celebrity culture today that far outdoes the mentality of first-century Galilee.  Just a half century or so ago, people still had respect for kings, popes and presidents. Today, they are just celebrities, and when they come to town, the paparazzi chase them through the streets, we wave our handkerchiefs, take our photographs, and then can’t wait to get home to tell all our friends on Facebook who we’ve just seen.

And of course, nobodycares what the man says, nobodycares about the values he endorses, nobodyhas any interest in obeying the man’s laws, or respecting his wishes, or following his good example, or believing in him.  After all, celebrities come and go, and our only stability in such a world as this is to cheer them on, and then to cheer them off, while we remain unchanged.  Wehave become the only stable thing in this world that swirls around us.  Our steady reliance on our own attachment to the same old sins. This, I fear, is what Christ would find if he walked the Streets of Urbana today.  He would be welcomed as a celebrity, and people would be more interested in what he can do, than in who he is.

It’s not just the millennials who are guilty of this spoiled attitude.  After all, aren’t we too partly guilty of it?  Think about it!  When do we pray—reallypray?  Isn’t it when we want God to dosomething for us?  We pray to God when we have a problem, when we have a favor to ask, when we want him to intervene on our behalf.  In other words, when we want him to perform a miracle for us, to interfere in the universe he created by altering the natural chain of cause and effect. “Please God, take away the headache (that’s the result of the two gallons of liquor I consumed last night), please let my soccer team win the World Cup, please let me pass the examination, please do this, do that.”  The bottom line with most of our prayers is that we aren’t prepared to suffer the consequences of our actions, or rather we don’t accept the consequences of Adam and Eve’s action in eating the forbidden fruit that caused suffering and death to enter into the world.  Are we really being fair if we think we are entitled to some alleviation of our sufferings in this vale of tears?  Shouldn’t we simply thank God for the opportunity to suffer in this world in reparation for our sins, rather than in Purgatory with its far more terrible pains and sufferings?   And how many times a day do we pause to remember our Lord’s own terrible sufferings on Calvary and give tearful thanks for our redemption?  You see, we’re really not so far from the madding crowd, are we, demanding miracles and party tricks?  And shame on us.

And yet, in spite of this seemingly unacceptable tendency we have to pray for favors, our Lord tells us elsewhere in the Gospels that we should pray.  He wants us to pray for favors.  While today he sighs as he looks up to heaven, and while we can almost hear the frustration in his voice as he cures the deaf  mute, he still does answer the prayers of the crowd, even if they were motivated by the desire to be entertained.  He cures the man, obviously not to please the crowds, but out of the pure motive of compassion he has for this pawn of the multitude, who through no fault of his own has been dragged in front of Our Lord for their entertainment.  For him, our Lord has pity.  And so we must hope that in spite of our own negligence in prayer when things are going well for us, he will take equal pity on us and our loved ones when we cry out for his mercy.

We should, nevertheless, examine our motives when we pray.  We must choose our prayers carefully, and out of love of God and our neighbor, rather for our own petty whims and desires.  Our prayers should be for others, rather than ourselves, and when we do pray for ourselves, it should be as our Lord himself taught us, for our daily bread, for forgiveness of our sins, the resistance of temptation, and deliverance from evil.  If we do ask for material things like money, let it be so that we can pay our legitimate bills, rather than so that we can afford some fanciful luxury we’ve seen on eBay. Let us avoid doing those things that get us into trouble in the first place, such as maxing out our credit cards for things we don’t need.  To do so and then expect the Creator of the world to bail us out is simply tempting God.

To sum up, praying should not be something we do as a reflex reaction whenever we aren’t getting what we want.  We should stand in awe of God’s occasional interventions in our lives, not smugly feel that we are entitled to them.  Let our prayers be made humbly, aware that we do not deserve more than what God has already given us.  Perhaps we should follow our missal a little more closely. Let’s try and do this a bit more diligently from now on, rather than just make up our own prayers for what we think we need.  Instead, let’s take a keener interest in what’s said by the priest after every time he utters those momentous words, “Let us pray.”