Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“I forgive you.”
These were the words spoken some three years ago by Nadine Collier as tears ran down her face. She was speaking to the accused killer of her mother, Ethel Lance, who was studying the Bible in Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
She went on: “You took something very precious away from me. I will never get to talk to her again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
After much sobbing, she managed to continue again: “You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives you and I forgive you.”
What’s even more amazing is that Nadine was not alone. One by one, the members of the families who lost loved ones at the hand of those murdered at this church rose to do the same: Forgive! The message was repeated again and again: Forgive!
The power of their faith still resonates across America and beyond. It was a day in which grace – amazing grace – won out over hate. In the words of one commentator: “Even atheists had to see divinity in these families built on love.”
But where did that miraculous power come from that enabled these heart-stricken people to reach out to a mass murderer so mercifully?
Perhaps today’s gospel gives us a clue.
It’s a gospel passage that sends an enormously important message to each one of us: trust in the grace and power of God.
To illustrate this message, Mark, the author of today’s gospel, tells the story of two women – one elderly, the other young.
The older woman had been menstruating for as long as the “little girl” in today’s gospel had been alive. Both of them hoped beyond hope that there was someone who could hear a desperate cry and answer it, or feel an anguished touch and respond to it. What they both discovered was that there was someone. His name was Jesus.
What both of these women discovered was that God, through Jesus, hears the cry of pain and is touched by human anguish. What they each discovered was that the God we believe in through Jesus is a God that can be experienced in real life – right now.
Like in that church in Charleston, South Carolina. Like in the everyday wonders of parenting, like in the healing that takes place in medical centers, or in the birthing of children, or in the celebrations of life-long marriages, or in the recovery of addicts, or in the raising to new life of people imprisoned, or in the imparting of forgiveness to people who have harmed us.
What Mark is trying to help us see is that grace is everywhere. God truly is Emmanuel: with us, for us, among us.
But today’s gospel takes it a step further: God is present especially to those most afflicted. And, because of that, God is creating miracles every day: miracles of conversion and repentance and new beginnings. Miracles of hope. Miracles of courage. Miracles of faith.
Jesus has the same message for each one of us who has proclaimed our hopes dead, and who has given up on the possibility of a new beginning. It’s the same message he gave to those people who were mourning a death in today’s gospel: “The child is not dead, but asleep.”
And then it happened: “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”
He is saying the same to us to this day: Arise from your hatred. Arise from your blindness. Arise from your prejudices. Arise from your fears and your smallness.
Grace can win out over hate.
That church in Charleston, South Carolina made that abundantly clear.
