8 July 2019
Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Jesus celebrates two victories in our Gospel today: a woman’s faith leads to an encounter with a power she could never have expected, and the faith of a father leads to an encounter with the Lord of Life. How Satan must have reeled with the twin blows!
Imagine the despair of the hemorrhaging woman, shunned by her community, her family, unable even to use the same chair as another person. Twelve years of enduring this shame for something she could not help: twelve years of being “unclean.” What hooks the Enemy must have had in her! What designs he must have laid to one day ensnare her soul. Does not St. Peter write “Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour,” (1 Peter 5:8)? A lion often hunts by scattering the herd to separate the young, the old, and the sickly from the safety of the herd: being unclean, she could not congregate with the rest of the faithful, go to the Temple, and so on. How he must have been prowling! Yet she courageously goes to the Lion of Judah (Revelation 5:5) as He was walking by, and by merely touching His cloak—grazing His mane with her fingertips!—she is restored to health: she is made clean. Satan prowled about her as a great lion; he flees from her now as a whelp.
Imagine the despair of the official whose daughter had just died, his house full of mourners and people wailing at the tragic death of such a young girl. Yet he possessed the same faith as did the bleeding woman: he knelt before Jesus and begged Him come. Imagine Satan’s delight at the opportunity to torment the official, how he worked through the faithless crowd to discourage and dissuade him. “Leave the rabbi alone; what can be done?” The crowd would even ridicule Jesus; how they must have done worse to the girl’s father who dared hope that something could be done, even when the shadow of death lay over his daughter like the shade of an immovable mountain. Yet the official had hope, and the spark of that hope grew into a flickering flame of faith: suddenly that faith yielded to “…the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” (John 1:4-5). The darkness fled, and the girl awoke from death to life again. What of that man’s flickering faith? “…news of this spread throughout all that land.” It caught the area ablaze: the long grasses of death, of doubt, was being burned up in faith, and the Enemy found himself with less and less cover from which to pounce on his prey.
Jesus is on an unstoppable hunt for Satan, and He is defeating him at every turn, scorching the earth behind Him with faith, with light, so that there is nowhere for him to hide. Satan is forced to retreat further and further until, at last, these two lions would do battle upon the Cross. But already Our Lord’s victory is foreshadowed today: it would be Him, hemorrhaging without end upon the Cross, who would cleanse the world of the uncleanness of sin, and it would be His death that would destroy death forever.