It may be surprising, but the sacrament I celebrate the most often - besides the Eucharist - is the Anointing of the Sick. It makes sense because illness - and even death - are just normal parts of a human life.
People ask to be anointed because they're seeking healing, seeking comfort, seeking hope - and so they go to God - they go to Him because He's the one who can give them those things.
Jesus was known as a healer. Many of the stories we hear in the Gospels are stories of Jesus restoring someone to health - or even bringing them back to life.
Usually, the sick person or someone else comes to Jesus asking for this healing. When He sees their faith, Jesus heals them. But today's gospel story is a little different: no one asks Jesus to bring that man back to life. He sees the man's mother and the crowd of mourners, and on His own initiative, He performs the miracle.
The crowd is obviously amazed. They proclaim Jesus as a "great prophet," referring back to stories like the one of Elijah we heard in the first reading, stories where God used His prophets to perform miracles.
But Jesus' mission - and His identity - are much greater than Elijah's. Jesus can restore life, because He is life itself. He can heal because only in Him do we find wholeness - wholeness that is much more than only physical health, but holiness - being restored in our relationship with the Father.
The gospel says that Jesus saw the grieving mother and was "moved with pity for her." Her suffering touched Jesus' heart. Her son was dead and only the touch of Jesus could give him life again - but she needed healing too.
In fact, all of us, even at the peak of our health, when we feel indestructible, are in need of healing. We are wounded by sin - these wounds hurt our relationship with God, with the people around us, and even with ourselves.
Often we don't notice these wounds - or we try to ignore them; but they are there: sins that we can't overcome, shame over our past, relationships that have fallen apart.
Jesus desires to heal those wounds and His physical healings are a sign that He also wants to restore our spiritual health. How does He do that? How do we find that healing? It's not a complicated answer - He does it in the sacraments.
We bring Him our sins in confession and He gives us forgiveness.
We receive Him in the Eucharist and He gives us His own life.
When we're physically sick, we ask for His help with the Anointing of the Sick - and He gives us spiritual healing as well.
If we're open to it, Jesus can transform our wounds and weaknesses into opportunities for grace. We just have to realize that we need Him.
It's easy to admit our weakness when we're physically sick and there's nothing we can do about it; but we have to acknowledge the illness in our souls and come to the only One who can make us whole again.
When I anoint a sick person in the hospital, there's often the sense that they're placing everything in God's hands. That's our pathway to healing: surrendering everything we are and asking the Lord to make it holy.
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