Author: tshultz

I will start with a confession: I’m a junkie, and my drug of choice is English mystery shows. Foyle’s War, Grantchester, Single-Handed, Christie… the list goes on and on. I like them because what they show is people in stressful situations, and that always ups the ante, so to speak, on human interest.

Plus, I love the accents.

In re-watching Broadchurch recently, a drama that deals eloquently and respectfully with a village torn apart by a child’s murder, the grieving parents go to the local priest and say, “We prayed and prayed! Why can’t we find peace?” And the priest replies with compassion and love and a little sadness, “Sometimes God doesn’t give us what we ask for. Sometimes he gives us what we need.”

It’s a profound lesson for those of us who grew up on (and still use) laundry-lists instead of prayers. “I want this… and this… and this…”

I’m very struck by the story within the story of today’s Gospel when Jesus—already hurrying on his unquestionably important mission of raising a child from the dead—stops when he feels someone touching his garment. A woman has touched it, a woman with a terrible disease, and believing she would be healed, she reached out to him. Matthew’s account of this encounter is shorter than that of the other evangelists, but we still get the idea. She believed him to be a healer—a good thing—but she also didn’t really see much beyond what she was asking for. I want to be healed. I want to be out of pain. I know you have some kind of magic. You don’t even have to turn around. I just want to be healed; that’s all.

She wanted health; she would have been quite contented to have had no more to do with him, if she could only have been cured and then slipped away from the crowd. She had her prayer list: “I want this… and this… and this…”

But Jesus isn’t about lists, and, as the priest in the other story observed, sometimes we don’t get what we want, but rather what we need. In this case, the woman got both. She got what she wanted, instant healing, which in turn may have made her more open to what Jesus subsequently observed she needed: faith in the healer.

Probably accustomed to slinking around—any disease having to do with blood would have automatically made her unclean—she was now suddenly in the spotlight. Jesus stops, he turns. The crowd around him stops too, probably disgruntled: they thought they were on their way to a resurrection. Everyone is staring at her. There are probably some unkind words said. But Jesus, having caught her in her part of the bargain, now seals his: you took a risk, he tells her. Now you’re well. What’s next?

Even if we get what we want, even when we get what we want, there’s always a “what’s next?” God isn’t a benevolent Santa Claus in the sky, happy to hear what we want and give it to us, his only reward a plate of cookies and a glass of tepid milk. God could have originated the adage “to whom more is given, more is expected.” You have been healed; is your life the same?

Of course, it isn’t for us, any more than it was for her. Matthew is brief in his description, but Mark goes into more detail. In his version, the woman stands up, only to then throw herself at Jesus’ feet. She got her healing, but she got so much more besides. She didn’t slink away. She didn’t cover herself in shame. She became a follower of Jesus. There was no real connection between touching the robe and healing, but the woman thought there was, and so Christ stooped to her childish thought, and allowed her to prescribe the form his mercy should take. He gave her what she wanted. And then, by acknowledging her, by—shockingly—speaking directly to her, he gave her also what she needed: the opportunity to take the pathway to eternal life.

My dearest friend Caren is struggling in a job that has become increasingly toxic. She has education, years of experience, immense qualifications. For over a year she’s been sending out her résumé, and every time a company seems interested, something dramatic suddenly happens. The company is acquired by another one. There’s a freeze on hiring. Some reorganization is going on. Meanwhile, things at her current job are going from bad to worse, as her department is being phased out altogether.

She keeps asking God—no, imploring God—to help her secure a new job. For reasons far beyond our understanding, he apparently is saying no. Or not yet. We don’t know.

God isn’t giving her what she wants, what she’s asking for. Is he giving her what she needs? In some convoluted way, that’s what we’re being called to believe. That is the essence of faith. To touch the garment. To take the setbacks. To not see where the road is going, but to trust it’s going somewhere. To put away the list of things we want and sit for a time with what we have and then ask, humbly, for the next best step.

On those English mystery TV shows I watch, this all gets resolved in an hour or so. In real life, it takes a little longer. I ask for your prayers for my friend. And for patience in your own lives. God really is at work in our world. We may not see it, but we know it. We have touched the garment. We have been healed… and so much more.

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The first humans, we learned in school, domesticated fire, and in so doing they changed their species’ trajectory dramatically. Now humans could cook food. Now they could live in colder climates. Now they could keep wild animals at bay.

Those early fires served another purpose, just as important: they provided a place for people to gather. And when people gather, the first thing they do is tell stories. We love stories! We love true stories, the stories of our ancestors, the daring feats others performed, the cautionary tales. And we love made-up stories, too, through which we stretch our creativity and learn truths we might not understand otherwise.

God gave us a love of stories, and then he gave us a plethora of stories to love.

It’s not accidental that Christianity is one of the three “religions of the book.” Being Christian is holding dear the stories handed down to us that define who we are, teach us our faith, and challenge us to become better people.

And no one knew the value of storytelling better than Jesus. Throughout the Gospels, we see him time and time again speaking and teaching in parables—stories—just as he is doing in today’s Gospel, when he contrasts the wise man building his house upon a rock with the foolish man building his on sand. In a scenario not unlike those we’re facing already with climate change, “the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house.”

I have to admit this example makes me a little nervous. I live in a very small cottage in a place particularly vulnerable to floods, as my whole community was built—no joke—on a sand bar. In a literal way, I am the foolish man of Jesus’ parable: I see the peril and have chosen to live here nonetheless.

Oops.

But that’s the power in Jesus’ story, isn’t it? It hit close to home for me—well, literally, but figuratively as well. I know well and have accepted my foolishness in living where I do; having that mirror turned toward me in the guise of a story underscores what I already know to be true. So how much more powerful was it for me, then, to understand the truth that’s behind the story: that I can bear to lose my home, should that terrible storm come… but I couldn’t bear to lose something deeper, the point of Jesus’ narrative.

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell–and great was its fall!”

We’re all foolish sometimes, in some aspects of our lives, aren’t we? That’s part of human nature. Sometimes we do what’s right, and sometimes we don’t. We make good choices and we make bad choices. But behind all that day-to-day decision-making, beyond all the ups and downs of what each new moment might bring us, is the point Jesus is making: in our spiritual lives, we can’t afford foolishness.

In other words, live in a cottage by the sea if you must, take your chances in this life, but be serious about what needs to be taken seriously.

And what is Jesus so serious about, that he’s making it into a story so we will understand it, so we won’t forget? That we aren’t supposed to just hear the word of God. We’re not supposed to just read the scripture, say the rosary, go to Mass. We’re supposed to act on it. Do something about it. Take it seriously.

The power of storytelling is the power of memory. We might not remember lists, or advice, or historical dates, or what’s in the periodic table of elements, but we remember stories. They enter our consciousness at a different level from facts. They become part of us. To communicate with someone at the deepest level, at the level of memory and faith and love and everything serious, you tell a story. Stories give ideas power.

And so Jesus sits us down around a metaphorical fire and tells us a story. The story has a moral, and it’s a deceptively simple one: we are to act as though we were followers of Christ. A folk song back in the 60s said, “they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Farther back still, St. Francis of Assisi said, “You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads.” We are called to live differently, to act differently, because we have heard the word of God and it has changed our lives.

Hear Jesus’ words. Act upon them. That is what will make you the wise person, the one who thinks things through, the one who is ready for the storms.

As to where you build your physical house? Well… maybe I’m not the best person to ask about that!

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