Acting Like Christ

Acting Like Christ

Imagine suffering from a slow loss of blood, on and off, day after day for twelve years! And in Jesus’ time, loss of blood like this made one ritually impure, and so you became isolated from the community. Unclean!

St. Ignatius talks of the Magis: the ‘more’ that Jesus is asking of us. Look at Jesus and his Magis: though divine, he was still a first-century Jewish man, but he sees ‘more,’ feels ‘more,’ going beyond the barriers so deeply entrenched in his culture separating men from women and the clean from the unclean. He turns to her, not away, and calls her “Daughter.” Healing takes place.

Our culture is full of equally entrenched barriers separating us from one another. Do you have the courage, the love, to see ‘more’, do ‘more’? If you are united to Christ you can act like Christ.  (Don’t you really want that?)

—Fr.Mark Henninger, S.J., a philosophy professor by trade, now serves as a pastoral care chaplain at Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL.