Friday, 22nd Week of Ordinary Time

Matthew 9:27-34
The Daily Office

With today’s reading, we conclude a section of Matthew’s Gospel (chapters 8-9), which focus on Jesus’s miracles, the deeper meaning of those miracles, and the reaction, positive and negative.  Jesus was not the only miracle worker making his way through that part of the world then.  And none of the later propaganda opposing Jesus ever denied that he was able to do miraculous things.  The two blind men point to that deeper meaning when they cry aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.”  The Messiah was to be the Son of David, and those two blind men saw what no one else could.  Heard in the wrong places, by the wrong people, namely those in power; Jesus asks them to stay quiet.  Little good that does.

So the Messiah shows his power to do what?  Heal physical illness and resuscitate the dead?  Certainly, but also to restore the community of Israel, and eventually the whole human race, to right relationship with God and each other.  Jesus’s willingness to enter the house of an impure Roman soldier – a Gentile; his healing of unclean lepers and unclean bleeding women; and his raising of an unclean dead girl; all this manifests Jesus’s power to heal isolation and loneliness.

Not everyone is ready for this Good News of reconciliation and relationship.  “But the Pharisees said, ‘He casts out demons by the prince of demons.’”  And their unrelenting opposition to will result in Jesus knowing the same isolation, the same loneliness, on the Cross.  There was no miraculous deliverance for Jesus that Friday.  But because of that Good Friday, we can be sure that we are never alone in our pain and suffering.