After Epiphany – Friday – January 9, 2026
H O M I L Y
"Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him and said: ...Be cured! And the leprosy left him at once". This is one of the first acts of healing done by Jesus. We call those healings: "miracles". The Bible rather called them "wonders".
What is a miracle? -- For us a miracle is something that is beyond the laws of nature. We have identified what we consider a certain number of what we call "laws of nature", and we call "miracle" everything that is either against or beyond these laws of nature or cannot be explained by them.
For the people of the Bible there were no miracle, because there were no laws of nature. They believed that the whole creation was subjected to only one law, which was the free and unpredictable will of God. Everything good that happened was considered a sign of God's love and mercy; and when something extraordinarily good happened, they spoke of a "wonder of God", a marvelous manifestation of his love for us.
When Jesus does what was prefigured in yesterday's gospel, when he makes the cripple walk, the blind see, the deft hear, he does not want to show himself as a miracle worker; he simply wants to show the Father's love for all his children.
Jesus can show that love of the Father, because he is totally in communion with Him. Luke, in today's gospel, faithful to his own orientation, mentions again, right after this wonderful act of Jesus: ".. he would always go off to some place where he could be alone and pray”.
The crowds, says Luke, gather to hear him and to have their sickness cured. We know however that the same crowds will gradually abandon him and, in the end, cry "crucify him". Let us pray that our own faith and confidence in him can be firm and can survive all the storms of our existence