Homily for the Memorial of Saint Scholastica

Today’s Gospel passage highlights the great popularity of Jesus among the ordinary people of Galilee. In particular, He attracted the sick and broken because God’s healing power was so clearly at work through Him. People begged Him to let them touch even the tassel on His cloak, as the woman had done who was healed of her flow of blood. The Gospel says that people were hurrying to bring their sick to Him. The poor and the needy were especially desperate to get to Him and to make contact with Him.

In our own lives, too, it is often in our brokenness and weakness that we seek out the LORD with the greatest sense of urgency. Something happens to us that brings home to us our vulnerability, our weakness, our inability to manage things completely on our own. In those situations, when we come face to face with our limitations, we can seek out the LORD with greater energy and an urgency that we don’t normally display. It is those experiences, when we come face to face with our frailties, that bring home to us our need for the LORD and our dependence on Him. It is often the darker and more painful experiences of life that open us up to the LORD. When St. Paul was struggling with his “thorn in the flesh,” he heard the Risen LORD say to him, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” Our various experiences of weakness can be like doorways through which we reach out to the LORD and the LORD comes to us.+