Monday, February 3, 2003 - Memorial of St. Blasé

Today’s gospel is filled with many images, some of them perhaps almost frightening to imagine, like the man possessed by demons and completely out of his mind, crying out and out of control.  It reminds us that if we are away from God, we become wound up with other things and are controlled by our feelings.  Even physically sometimes we feel ill with obsession or anger; I think that the closest we might come to possession is when we are “blind with anger.”  We can get angry not just at other people, but at a car, or a computer or some other inanimate object, but we are just completely transformed by this drive of anger. We become another person, and we feel that we are cut off. It is almost like the possessed man who doesn’t just have a momentary lapse, but was constantly (for years even) in this awful state of being so taken up with things that took him away from God.  Now obviously, being possessed by demons was not under his control, so it’s not that he chose to be this way, but at the same time, God uses this image to help us understand the evilness, the awfulness of sin… not only because it offends God, but because the consequences of sin lead us away from God.  We feel existentially bereft, empty, completely lost.  And then we look around because we have this great desire to see God, we long to see God’s face, and we want to go back to God.  And this man is no different. 

It is interesting how as Jesus approaches, the possessed man comes towards him, he runs towards Jesus, catching sight of him from a distance.  He prostrates himself in hope before the Lord, crying out in a loud voice: “ What have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most high God?”  It’s a mystery, how much of these actions are from the devil, and how much is from the man, whose life is very complicated because it is far from God.  Now, he is just trying to simplify his life by throwing himself down at the feet of Jesus Christ and asking for help.  You and I have a choice sometimes in our lives: we can either complicate our life by choosing sin or we can complicate our life by choosing God. Either way, we are going to complicate our life.  Life is not simple, but how do we want to complicate our lives — away from God, isolated, lost or with God?  I’d say complicate our lives with God because when God enters into our lives we have to make a commitment.  It means that we have to say no to many other things, we have to say yes to God. It means that He’s going to ask us for things that, otherwise, we might not be able to give.  He’s going to ask us to live virtue, he’s going to ask us to look out for other people and forget about ourselves.  And sometimes he’s going to test our faith, as we read in the first reading today, by adversity and difficulties. He’s going to respect us to rise to the occasion and exercise our faith, instead of becoming desperate, angry or lost. 

Some people these days are particularly struggling to exercise their faith, certainly families of those seven who lost their lives in the space shuttle disaster over the weekend.  Other people say: “Why did this happen? It’s such an awful thing.” But this is where our faith should come in. We should say that God has his reasons and we just have to remember that when he calls someone to himself, that’s a great good in itself.  God then tests the faith of those people who were left behind, the families and friends. We see that most of the families who do have faith return to God in prayer and try to make sense of something that really does make sense. God’s reasons are not always clear.

Maybe there’s an inkling of faith that brought the possessed man to Jesus. He asked for relief, and he is freed from his bonds. God casts out the demons.  And of course when we think about this young man growing up ….we can be sure he never thought that someday he would be possessed by a demon and spend years in the mountains, in the tombs, screaming and shouting.  He probably had other plans, and this happened, and kept him off track.  His life got complicated. Now he experiences the healing power of Jesus Christ and his life gets complicated again because he’s committed now to this man. 

It’s a wonderful scene when Jesus was chased off by everybody in the town because fear kept them from being grateful. Their first reaction was: “Could you please leave, could you get out of here?”  Jesus doesn’t argue, or remonstrate or denounce. He just leaves and gets into the boat.  He probably said, “Fine,  I’m gone.  You don’t have faith, there’s nothing I can do. “  Except the one man who had faith and came into the boat and said :” I want to go with you.” Obviously, he doesn’t want to be separated from this great liberator.  Our Lord complicates his life, “No you stay here , it’s not  going to be easy to just come with me.  You stay here. You tell your family and your friends what God has done for you. It’s your responsibility because now something has happened that has changed you, you have to share that with others.” So his life has become complicated again because he’s going to work now for God for the rest of his life, when before it was complicated because he was in the tombs completely out of control.  Which one is better? Obviously, he’s much happier in  pursuing God’s course. And so we will be happier when we make the choice between complicating our lives by rejecting God or complicating our lives by embracing God. We choose to embrace God, to go towards him and ask him whom we once rejected to heal us, to forgive us, to restore us so that we can follow him wholeheartedly once again and he will give us that miracle.

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