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Jesus Came to Save, not to Cure

            I am struck this year, for some reason, more than ever with the superficiality of those who assert that doing penance during Lent is not important. What is important, they insist, is social action. You know, help the poor and minorities. (Such an opinion reveals a very deep prejudice, by the way, but we’ll avoid that topic for today.) And so, Social Action is the new god of the new age, or so many Catholics think.

            But Jesus did not come to do social work, or to make us to social work. In fact, he did not come to even heal the sick. Nor did he come to abolish poverty, or to end wars, or to stop people from dying. No, Gentle Reader, God is not an ATM, nor is he a pill that can remedy all our tummy aches.

            Yes, he did heal and cure and make the blind see. But that’s not why he came. Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, came to save us from our sins. His miracles were not the goal of his visit on earth, they were rather the signs.

            I wish to quote Pope Benedict on this matter:

            “A Bishop from the Congo on an ad limina visit in these days said to me: Europeans generously give us many things for development, but there is a hesitation in helping us in pastoral ministry; it seems as though they considered pastoral ministry useless, that only technological and material development were important. But the contrary is true, he said; where the Word of God does not exist, development fails to function and has no positive results. Only if God’s Word is put first, only if man is reconciled with God, can material things also go smoothly… [Jesus] indicated this priority [of God] with great clarity: I did not come to heal – I also do this, but as a sign –, I came to reconcile you with God.”[1]

            Similarly, only when Jesus saves the soul does the salvation of the body come, and that only at the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. Let us therefore, in our Churches, return to devotions, Eucharistic adoration, frequent confession, worthy and frequent communions, rosaries, ways of the cross, novenas, processions and so forth. Once this spiritual piece is in place, the rest will come as effect from cause. But if we spend all our energy in the internals, but still live in and love sin, even the little external good we do will dry up, remain sterile and vanish.