DRAWING LIFE AND HEALING FROM THE LORD


TUESDAY, TWENTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

1 Cor 6:1-11; Ps 149:1-6,9; Lk 6:12-19

Power for our healing and Salvation

We have established that faith is a necessary condition for our regeneration in Jesus Christ. The gift of faith is God’s offer of new life to our souls that are dead in sin. Faith assures our reception of a spiritual life in Christ and keeps us connected to the Holy Spirit who nourishes the new life with what truly belongs to Christ. This connection or communion with the Holy Spirit is very essential for the growth of our spiritual life. As we read in the Gospel, that power was coming out of Jesus Christ and healing the people gathered around him to listen to his teachings. This illustrates the general or regular setting for the life and growth of a Christian. We must always gather around Jesus Christ to listen to him, for his word is our heaven/spiritual food. It is gathered around him that the Holy Spirit renews our spiritual and physical life. “People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured, and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.” They were all trying to touch him, this desire is necessary for us to receive the power of regeneration.

By our faith, a spiritual gift from God, we have what it takes to connect to Jesus Christ. Since faith is the assurance of what we do not see, it brings the presence of Jesus Christ to us in spirit, so that we can touch him spiritually through his word which is spirit and life. This is how we should feed our spirit day and night with the bread of heaven. This necessary activity of a Christian is why we posited that the Christian life is essentially an interior life. We constantly draw near to Jesus Christ and touch him in the interiority of our mind and heart; in interior prayer, we experience a renewal of our spirit through the Holy Spirit, a renewal that gradually heals our bodies and drives away the demonic spirits. The action of our Lord in the Gospel is an example for us to emulate. He constantly drew life and spiritual renewal from his Father in prayer, as he informed us in the Gospel. “Jesus went out into the hills to pray, and he spent the whole night in prayer to God. When day came, he summoned his disciples and picked out twelve of them; he called them apostles.” Through his prayerful communion with the Father, our Lord accomplished the will of the Father in all things. He informed us that he was sent by the Father, and he drew life from him. In the same way, all he called and sent must draw life from him.

The Corinthian community of faith fell short of the expected maturity in Christian living because they fell short in interior communion with the Lord. Hence, they copied the life and activities of the pagan world. Paul reprimanded them for their shallow Christian life. “You should be ashamed: is there really not one reliable man among you to settle differences between brothers and so one brother brings a court case against another in front of unbelievers? It is bad enough for you to have lawsuits at all against one another: oughtn’t you to let yourselves be wronged, and let yourselves be cheated?” They failed to follow the word and example of Jesus Christ because they were estranged from the Lord in their minds and the desire of their hearts. These happen when we cease to live an interior life of prayer and recollection. We were chosen in faith and prayer, we cannot live and fulfil our Christian vocation without faith and prayer. That is the seedbed of wrongdoing and abandonment of the kingdom of heaven. “People of immoral lives, idolators, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers are bred outside the company of Jesus Christ; we were such before we learned to constantly dwell in his presence, where no evil can thrive.   

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to form a habit of prayerful recollection as you taught us in the Gospel, that communing constantly with you, our minds and hearts may be transformed by the heavenly graces which the Holy Spirit infuses in us, and our bodies renewed to do your will always. 

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