30th Week in Ordinary Time 2021 - Friday - The Lord feeds, heals, and quenches

 All four Gospels contain accounts of the Lord eating and dining. All four record the last supper, for example. But Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the Lord’s supper in the house of the tax collector Levi and St. John is the only to record the Lord’s attendance at the wedding feast at Cana.

St. Luke is the only evangelist to record the meal in today’s Gospel passage in which the Lord heals the man with dropsy in the house of a pharisee on the sabbath.

This story is not the first time that the Lord has healed someone on the sabbath, but it is the first time he heals someone at a meal. He combines healing and eating. It’s also interesting who he heals. He heals a man with dropsy. Dropsy is a condition in which there is a build-up of fluid in a persons tissues, and so because of this imbalance with fluid, the person with dropsy is always thirsty—they are perpetually thirsty. And so here the Lord combines healing and eating and satisfying unending thirst.

What does that makes you think of? I don’t know about you, but this certainly makes me think of what we’re doing right now. In the celebration of Mass, the Lord feeds, the Lord quenches thirst, and the Lord heals

In the Eucharist, the Lord feeds us with his body and blood, giving us spiritual nourishment for the work of the Gospel and the pilgrimage to heaven. In the Eucharist, the Lord heals us of sinfulness, pride, grief, loneliness, division, and estrangement from God. And in the Eucharist the Lord quenches our thirst for the infinite God—like a dry weary desert our souls thirst for Him, and here that thirst is quenched.

Commenting particularly on the healing properties of the Eucharist, Pope Francis, said a few years ago, that the Eucharist is “powerful medicine for the weak”. We have many weaknesses: fear in preaching the Gospel, timidity in doing the work of the Lord, weaknesses of the flesh, the lack of willingness to suffer for Christ, temptations to sin, concupiscence. And the Eucharist is medicine for these weaknesses. And those who deprive themselves of the Eucharist, refusing to go to mass, deprive themselves of real medicine the Lord wishes to apply to their souls.

The Eucharist is also medicine for the greatest of our weaknesses: mortality. 

St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Ephesians said that the Eucharist is the “medicine of immortality…and the antidote  which  wards  off  death.” It “yields continuous life  in union with Jesus Christ.”

May we dispose our souls as often as possible to this food from heaven, the food that heals, the food that quenches for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

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For those who are deprived of the Eucharist, for lapsed Catholics, for the unbelieving, for those who doubt the Lord’s real presence, for those who have hardened their hearts toward God, and for a deeper appreciation of the great gift of the Eucharist among all God’s people. Let us pray to the Lord.

That young people will be blessed with good Christian example from their parents and fellow Christians, and that the word of God might be cherished, studied, and practiced in every Christian home. 

During and following this month of October, dedicated to the Most Holy Rosary, Catholics may take up this devotion with renewed vigor and trust in Our Lady’s never-failing intercession. 

For the healing of all those afflicted with physical, mental, emotional illness, for those in hospitals, nursing homes, hospice care, those struggling with addictions, for those who grieve the loss of a loved one, and those who will die today.

For the repose of the souls of our beloved dead, for all of the poor souls in purgatory, for the deceased members of our families, friends, and parish, for deceased clergy and religious, for those who have fought and died for our freedom.