Healing before preaching

The crowd in our present vocabulary has come to be associated with people power, protests, rallies, labor groups, squatters, the oppressed, the common tao, the disabled, Eat Bulaga and lately even show-biz people. The clamor of the crowd has become the voice of the wounded and our suffering people. Do we also include El Shaddai? Their singing and dancing, their rootings can be signs of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, of life’s vicissitudes, of needs and futile strivings, the puzzles of life, of sufferings, of still bleeding wounds, wounds inflicted by poverty and the privations the needy poor are heir to.

Call this crowd, ‘congress of the streets’. They may pose dangers to the powers, storm the gates of Malacañang, the Batasan or any seat of government or mega millionaire businessmen. They are a noisy crowd all right; but they do have something to say and what they say can be the key answer to the questions bugging the nation at present as to why there is no law and order, why there is no peace, why all the unrest?

Maybe it was not so bad in our Lord’s time before He began to preach the Kingdom of God by the Sea of Galilee. But already, we are given His approach to His public ministry. What did He attend to first? Seeing the first fishermen, His first concern was, did they have any catch at all? Have they eaten? "Follow me". And He initiated His future apostles into His first works of mercy. He did not preach outright. He first expelled unclean spirits in possession of a man. "What have you to do with us… have you come to destroy us… Holy One of God" (Mk 1:23)? Not really a confession of the evil one but an attempt to ward off the power of Jesus as an opposing spirit, to guarantee mastery over Him. But Jesus silenced the cry of the evil one by driving Him out of the man. Jesus after that went to Capharnaum. There He visited the house of Simon’s mother-in-law who was sick with fever and healed her. It is narrated that many possessed with unclean spirits, and many sick were brought to Him and He healed them all. Then He proceeded to the nearby villages to preach, for which Jesus said He came. But obviously, He did not heal to show off the wonder of His power. His was a work of mercy towards those who suffer.

The crowds who shout and make noise in our streets are telling us the kind of wounds our hapless people sustain in their daily lives. They have to be listened to. We do not go about bringing their problems for Congress to deliberate on them or to raise issues, to give our lawmakers opportunity to practice on the techniques of argumentation and debate or to sharpen their speech power further; worst still to use them to hit each other, to spend all the time on rhetoric which very often becomes exercises of futility. We do not solve the problems of our people that way. We do not heal wounds with saliva or gab. We heal the wounds of our people by works of mercy. For these wounds are inflicted by oppression, injustice, exploitation, poverty and immorality. It will do us well instead to offer fervent prayers to God begging Him to expel all the demons lurking in our midst and see what we can do to step-up the good works for our helpless people who suffer and are against the wall. What really ails our people? What kind of wounds do they sustain? We have to answer these questions not with words but with actions. Sincere, honest-to-goodness action, without any strings attached. Before God, we face this challenge.

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Mark 1:29-39.