8 February 2021
Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
We continue our healing journey with Jesus. Today we follow him to Gennesaret, where the crowds have already heard of his healing wonders. The gospel tells us that the people “laid the sick in the marketplaces.” This is a curious detail.
The marketplace is usually the place where people bring goods, the fruits of their labor in hopes that someone will take interest in them and purchase them. On this memorial of Saint Josephine Bakhita, who was kidnapped and enslaved at the age of nine, we remember one of the greatest ills of humanity which persists in many ways today, that of selling other human beings as living pieces of merchandise.
Ailing humanity is brought before Jesus in the marketplace. Would he want anything to do with us? Would he desire us? See us as “good” despite all our ills? The answer, thanks be to God, is yes. The word “redemption” which we associate with Jesus’ salvific mission, comes from the Latin “to buy back.” Jesus knows our pains, our struggles, the suffering we are capable of inflicting on one another. And yet like God in the story of Creation who regarding his creation “saw how good it was,” Jesus comes to offer his healing to bring us all back to our original goodness. The price he is willing to pay for that is his own life.