My dear brothers and sisters it is a great pleasure for me to be with you this evening to celebrate the Compassionate Healers’ Mass for the benefit and the intentions of all of those good and wonderful people who are involved in the ministry of healing and care of the sick in our Archdiocese. We come together here this evening as people who see health care as a ministry and not simply a profession or a job.

We are Christian health care workers; we are Catholic health care workers. We see health care as a ministry because we are followers of Jesus. We believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life for us: the way we follow every day, the truth we believe and the life we live. We see health care as a ministry because we know that Jesus has given us a share in the mission that he gave to the Church to carry out in the world we live in. Because we form part of the Church of Jesus Christ, because we are members of the very body of Jesus Christ by our baptism and our confirmation, we have a share of the mission which Jesus Christ gave to His Church.

Jesus said “The Son of Man has come not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom or many.”In its broadest sense, ministry is defined as “an act of serving.” Therefore, as we too follow the way that is Jesus, we understand that we are here not to be served but to serve. We see our work as sharing in the ministry of Jesus who came to serve and to heal.

Lay people in the Church who work as Medical Personnel, Health Care Workers, Volunteers, Parish Nurses, Men and Women Religious in Health Care Ministry, Ministry of Care Volunteers in Parishes and Health Care Facilities and so on, see their work as sharing in the ministry of Jesus in the world in which they live and work. Therefore as Catholic Christians we see our work in health care as a ministry, as an act of serving, as a sharing in the healing ministry of Jesus who said that he came so that people may have life and have it abundantly. (Jn 10:10)

Jesus Christ has sent his followers out into the world to bring the good news that he proclaimed to everyone in the world. Jesus wants the world to truly recognize that he alone is the one who can respond to the deepest longings of all humanity. He is the only one who can heal humanity. He alone can bring healing to a human race that is wounded through war and violence; that is weakened by hatred and jealousy, by selfishness and greed yet which longs for a life of fullness and peace and love.

As impossibly big as this sounds we do know that through our acts of service, through our ministry to those who suffer from illness and are in need of healing and comfort, we do bring this Good News to them. When we reach out and touch them, Jesus touches them.

We know through our own personal experience that illness robs people of the abundance that their life can be. I have a friend with whom I have been friends for over thirty years. We are the same age. We share a common enjoyment of Irish culture and music. Over the years we have gone to festivals, sung along with the best of the performers. He loved to dance and I would watch him and his wife dance until I was exhausted looking at them. He suffered a stroke and a heart attack two years and his life was changed. We went to the Irish Festival this past summer, but he was in a wheel chair, not able to sing or dance any more. That illness stole away much of his life.

Jesus came to give fullness of life. And so, over and over again in the Gospel, Jesus heals people who came to him; he heals them of diseases which robbed them of the fullness of life that God had created them to live. But we cannot ignore that, for Jesus, his healing was more than restoring physical health it was also a spiritual healing.

When Jesus healed the paralyzed man in the Gospel we listened to this evening, he not only restored his ability to walk, he went to an even deeper level; he went to the very heart of his existence as a human being. He healed his soul.

That man’s paralysis had caused him to be separated from his community. It robbed his family of his full sharing in their life and that separation turned his life into chaos as serious illness always does to us when those close to us become seriously ill or we ourselves become seriously ill.

But when we are separated from God who is the source of our life, then our very souls are turned into chaos and that chaos can spread like a disease to drag down our whole life. For Jesus, it is sinfulness that causes this separation from God, it is sinfulness that brings havoc into our lives and disrupts them destroying our wholeness. This is what Jesus came to heal in us: not just the ailments of the body but of our whole being.

And so when the friends of this man lowered their paralyzed friend down through the roof of Peter’s house to have Jesus heal him, what does Jesus say? He says to the paralyzed man: “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Jesus healed the man to the very depths of his heart and soul. And Jesus’ enemies ridiculed him. For only God can bring about that kind of healing, only God can forgive sins. Jesus was well aware that there is no visible evidence when God heals the wounds of sin. So Jesus said to them: Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven”, or to say, “Stand up and take your mat and walk”?¹⁰But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—he said to the paralytic—¹¹‘I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.’

And he did and they were amazed and they said: “Boy! We’ve never seen anything like that before.” And they were right. They had just seen God act in Jesus.

This is what we make present in our ministry of compassionate healing. When we comfort people who are in pain or turmoil because of illness, when we ease their pain, and calm their fears, we are bearing witness to Jesus, the Compassionate Healer. And in that witness, Jesus comes close to them and touches them. And when Jesus draws close to any of us to give the warm touch of his gentle hand, his healing goes to the very heart of who we are.

That is the healing that our ministry shows to all who are touched by our hands which we stretch out in this profound ministry we exercise. Our hands point to Jesus’ hands, our compassion to Jesus’compassion, and our ministry of service to Jesus’ ministry of service which has the power to heal the world, to heal our bodies and to heal our very souls.

I will close with this poem written by St. Theresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church:

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours. Amen