Friends
Peace be with you.
Have you ever heard of the superpower dilemma? The magazine Psychology Today asked people if they had the choice between being able to become invisible or being able to fly, which they would choose? How about you, which would you choose? I think I’d choose to fly but I’ve definitely been in situations where I wish I could turn invisible and sneak out of a place without having to talk to someone. As it turns out 70% of people would choose to fly and 30% to become invisible. More women would choose to be invisible than men. I heard about this on a radio program a few years ago and I started thinking about what superpower I would want. I like superhero movies so I know that each superpower can have drawbacks. They can quickly be abused for selfish reasons. Even the Wonder Twins, arguably the two superheros with the most pathetic superpowers, could be manipulated to using their superpowers for evil.
To understand our first reading, we have to back up one verse. It’s kinda crazy that they clipped it off because it’s pretty important. Peter and John are brought for the second time before the Sanhedrin and asked “By what power or by what name have you done this?” meaning, who told you to go to the Temple and heal a man on the sabbath. Peter’s response is that it was in Jesus’ name and that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Testament Psalm that we used for Mass today, “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone”. Actually, Peter sort of intensified this Old Testament verse by saying Jesus is the stone destroyed by you, the builders, who has become the cornerstone. In this case, the cornerstone they are referring to isn’t the stone at the bottom corner of a building where you put the name and date the building was built. The cornerstone, or capstone as it could be called, is the block that sits at the top of an arch that holds the two sides together. So, Jesus is the bridge bringing together the Jews with the Gentiles in one community of faith. Making sure you keep that first question, I think, softens Peter’s conclusion that it is only through Jesus' name that people can be saved. The Sanhedrin asked him by what name they healed the cripple and Peter responded that all of us can only be saved by Jesus’ name.
I look at this and ask myself why St. Peter and St. John were given the superpower to heal. That’s what started this confrontation, after all. Certainly, there are people in the evangelical world who claim to be able to heal people. If you watch Trinity Broadcasting Network, for example, you can see these people at work. Sometimes you wonder how much is the power of positive thinking, like I don’t have a sore shoulder because I’m going to ignore the pain, and how much is the power of Jesus’ name. Or perhaps, and I hate to suggest something like this, how much are they con men who are “healing” people as a kind of performance to get money like Steve Martin in the movie Leap of Faith? Still, if it happened for St. Peter and St. John, I’d think St. John Paul II or Pope Francis or St. Teresa of Calcutta would be able to do this in our time, and not just as a miracle after death to prove they’re in heaven. Why not as their walking and shaking hands with people wouldn’t they stop and say, like St. Peter and St. John did to this cripple, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, rise and walk.”
I bring this up because I think some of our evangelical friends miss the whole point of this passage. Some of them think that the message is that we must do everything in the name of Jesus. All their prayers conclude with “in Jesus name, we pray.” Some of them have even abandoned baptising in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, or the Trinitarian form as we call it, in favor of only baptising in Jesus name since, as we heard in the first reading, by his name alone we have salvation. The point Peter was making was that neither he nor St. John were the ones who healed this man who was crippled. It was Jesus who did it because he alone can bring about salvation. By saying that they were doing it in his name, they were humbly admitting that they couldn’t do it if it weren’t for Jesus.
Which, to be honest, reminds me of two things. First, if a sick person gets better when I pray, it’s not because of any superpower I have. It’s because Jesus healed her or him. When I stand behind the altar and say, “This is my body. This is my blood”, it does transubstantiate into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ because of how awesome of a preacher I am or how available I am throughout the week, it’s because Jesus is both awesome and omnipresent. And, when I say, “I absolve you of your sins” in confession, it’s not because of how forgiving or holy I am, it’s salvation offered to us by Jesus IN the ministry of his priests.
But, secondly, it does also remind me of how important it is to live my life in Jesus’ name. I was in a meeting this week and I got really frustrated and I let my tongue curse someone not present, basically asking God to take that person to the bad place when they die if you know what I mean. That wasn’t living my life in Jesus’ name. That was pretty transparently living my life in Fr. Dennis’ name. I could go on confessing my sins but I think I leave that to my time with my confessor, Fr. Austin. I’m guessing we could all list times we weren’t living our lives in ways that allow Jesus to work through them, in ways where we basically lose our identity in the identity of Jesus, where people can see the life of Jesus in our lives. If we can’t fly or become invisible, how can we live in Jesus’ name in such a way that others can see him in our actions?
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