How to be both a teacher and a healer

A Reflection for Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

The church I have been attending for the past month in Southern California has a bas relief of a pelican feeding her chicks on the front of the altar. It’s a seaside town, it is true, but nautical metaphors don’t otherwise abound in American Martyrs Catholic Church, so I have been curious as to who decided to place it there and why.

The image can be found in churches all over the world; it’s a metaphor for Christ adopted from a legend older than Christianity itself. It appears in the writings of Augustine and other early Christian authors and was later fairly widespread in the Middle Ages, known as the “Pelican in her Piety.” St. Thomas Aquinas included the image it in his famous Eucharistic hymn, “Adoro Te Devote”:

Pie pellicane, Iesu Domine, me immundum munda tuo sanguine;
cuius una stilla salvum facere totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.

Here is a loose translation of those lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., in “Godhead Here in Hiding”: 

Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

Why a pelican? Because of an ancient belief in the Mediterranean and Near East that a mother pelican would strike her own breast to provide blood to revive her children; so too did Jesus shed his blood to save the world. In addition to its obvious references to Christ’s passion and the Eucharist, it’s also one of several female metaphors for Jesus, who at one point in Scripture also compares himself to a mother hen caring for her brood.

And among the primary instincts and tasks of a mother—be that a pelican or a hen or a human—that we emphasize in almost every culture are a teaching aspect and a healing one. Sexist categorizations of gender roles aside, we still imagine a child with a scrape or an illness will seek comfort from his or her mother; so too do we expect many of the most important lessons we learn as very young children to come from our mothers, literal and figurative.

Pope Francis was fond of using the metaphor of a field hospital to describe the church. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds,” he told America and other Jesuit journals in 2013. “Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.” This is the church as healer and protector, nurturing her beloved.

The modern pope with whom Francis is most often linked, John XXIII, emphasized another venerable characteristic of the church in his encyclical “Mater et Magistra”: the church as a teacher as well as a mother. “To her was entrusted by her holy Founder the twofold task of giving life to her children and of teaching them and guiding them—both as individuals and as nations—with maternal care,” he wrote in his beginning. The tasks of instruction, of building up the church and caring for souls in imparting knowledge and wisdom, also are essential alongside and after the healing of our wounds.

What does all this have to do with Jesus? Note that in today’s Gospel reading from Mark, Jesus performs two of the emblematic tasks of his ministry: He teaches and he heals. 

First he teaches in the synagogue “as one having authority,” and his wisdom astonishes his listeners. A populace not yet sure of who or what Jesus is gets an introduction to him as an instructor and interpreter of God’s word. But he doesn’t stop there. When a man with an unclean spirit “cried out” in the synagogue against Jesus (when I imagine this scene, my sympathy lies with Jesus, the teacher dealing with a loudmouthed student who won’t stop interrupting, and Jesus can’t even give him detention), Jesus does something else instructive: He heals him.

The people in the synagogue were amazed by Jesus’ words of wisdom; they are amazed again—we use “amazed” for both words in English, though the Greek text actually uses two different verbs—by his healing of the man with the unclean spirit. He’s not just a teacher.

But notice their takeaway. 

 “What is this?” They agree that Jesus has introduced “a new teaching with authority,” but it is not just his words of wisdom that convince and inspire them. It is the healing he also effects. “He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him,” they say, and we are told his fame spreads throughout Galilee as a result. In other words, the two tasks (of Jesus, of the church, of each of us as Christians) are intertwined and inextricable, to instruct and to heal. 

We cannot be teachers if we do not seek to dress each other’s wounds first, and we cannot be healers if we do not care for each other’s growth in understanding.

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