Miraculous Love
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, July 21, 2024
The Lord seems to have been very mindful of the people he met. Men, women, children, the rich and poor, the well-positioned and even more the lowly, oppressed, needy and foreigners. The Mosaic Law was the overshadowing context of Jewish life and, after all, Jesus was a Jew, but people were more important to him than the Law.
Today he meets a Centurion, a Roman man of significance and authority. The soldier came to him with great humility. He came begging for the Lord's help for a servant who was very sick. What kind of wonderful slave-owner he must have been to care so much for him? I doubt that such compassion was common among such men.
And Jesus responds with humility. A hated Roman soldier, a Gentile, perhaps a murderer of Jewish people and yet Jesus humbly listens to him. The only thing that mattered at that moment was the meeting of the Perfect Image of God in the flesh to a desperate and broken man who bore the same image. Culture, religion, ethnicity, the past fade in significance when open hearts meet open hearts.
I believe they recognized each other in a very deep, spiritual way. The depths of suffering in the Centurion called out to the infinite depths of Divine Compassion and a miracle occurred. Miracles are not always stand-alone instantaneous events. Sometimes (perhaps usually) there is a process in motion before and after. In this story I sense a process. Who knows when it began, but we can see today where the process led. A miracle occurred at the very moment the two men recognized themselves in the other. Whatever happened after this brief encounter would certainly bear the mark of this one experience of rare and miraculous intimacy -- heaven and earth embraced and kissed each other and the servant and the Centurion were made whole.
In my prison work I have noticed a few things. One is that prisoners, with extremely rare exception, want and need to be loved. Another is that the great majority of them either had absent or negligent and abusive fathers. The two, of course, are connected. Walk the streets of Boston and Cambridge and you can see the same kind of suffering. Most of us want to remain blind to it. Christ calls us not to remain blind.
At some point, as God wills and we are willing, the Holy Spirit will open our eyes and we will be able to see things as they really are in bright and living color. And we will begin to see as God sees and hear as God hears and to be able to say with St. Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." And the people we meet each day without exception will be to us as the Centurion was to Christ.
I tell you this. Once God opens our hearts and minds and the seed of self-sacrificial love is planted, sprouts and grows, the eventual fruit will be saints.