Praise Jesus for healing broken hearts

February 5, 2006 -- Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

By Bishop Robert Morneau

	Bishop Robert Morneau
	Questions for reflection: 1. When has your heart been broken? 2. When have you experienced the healing power of Christ? 3. How have you helped to heal others?

The responsorial refrain sets the mood of today's liturgy: "Praise the Lord who heals the brokenhearted."

The great theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar once described the human heart in these terms: "The human heart: most foolish, most obstinate, most fickle of all creatures; the seat of all fidelity and of all treachery; an instrument richer than a full orchestra and poorer than a grasshopper's empty chirping; in its incomprehensibility a mirror image of God's own incomprehensibility."

We are given entrance into the broken heart of Job. He describes his life as sheer drudgery; he has been assigned months of misery; his nights are troubled and his soul is filled with restlessness. He concludes by saying that he shall not see happiness again. Here is a man whose heart is heavy. Probably our current understanding of psychology would label him as a depressed soul.

God came to Job to heal his broken heart. We know how Job ultimately trusted in the Lord. Despite severe loss and hardship, Job remains the paradigm of one who endured suffering and, in the end, tasted God's peace.

St. Paul does not appear to have a broken heart. Here he is preaching up a storm and identifying with the weak and the strong, the lowly and those in high places. Yet we know that his heart was heavy because his own people turned away from the message of Jesus. Paul struggled to share the gospel with as many as he could, hoping that the word of God's love in Jesus might bring people to faith.

Paul himself was healed on that road to Damascus. He was given new sight and a new heart. His mission was to participate in the redemptive, healing work of Christ. Without charge and with full authority, Paul preached in season and out of season. He even claimed that he had no choice, that his ministry was one under compulsion. Yet it was precisely in this that Paul found peace and joy.

Today's gospel is filled with people with demons and thus with broken hearts. Jesus came to set them free. His healing brought hope into their lives. And we see that all this redemptive work is grounded in prayer. "Rising early in the morning, he went off to a lonely place in the desert; there he was absorbed in prayer."

Various authors have reflected upon broken-heartedness. Here is C. S. Lewis: "When your heart's been broken it will be time for you to think of talking." Wise advice here. Speaking without compassion arising from one's own misery will be speech that cannot comfort. Until we have been there with Job or St. Paul or people possessed by demons, we should remain silent. Our words will be cold because our hearts have not felt the pain.

Alan Moorehead, in his The White Nile, speaks of people he met in pursuing the source of the Nile: "The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been conquered and made slaves." We all know that besides physical slavery there is also slavery of psychological and spiritual kind, arising out of emotional illness or sin. Jesus came into this broken-heartedness to heal us. For this we praise God.

The last word comes from a poet, Jessica Powers: "I turned my gaze lest the heart be twice broken / when innocence looked up to smile its trust." The poet's reference is to Abraham who has placed his son Isaac on the altar of sacrifice. Isaac was spared; Jesus was not. Our God knows broken-heartedness from the inside.

(Bp. Morneau is the auxiliary bishop of the Green Bay Diocese and pastor of Resurrection Parish in Allouez.)