Our Lord Jesus Christ

Good morning.

A whole town heals in one evening, and the next morning Christ leaves it anyway. Today's Gospel and today's epistle are both, in their own way, about who actually gets to keep what grows.

Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

The sequence in today's Gospel moves fast: Christ rebukes a fever out of Simon's mother-in-law, and "immediately rising, she ministered to them." By sunset, everyone in Capernaum who has a sick relative brings them to Simon's door, "and he laying his hands on every one of them, healed them." Demons cry out his identity; he silences them. By any measure, it's a complete night — nobody left untouched.

And then, at daybreak, he leaves. The crowd tries to physically hold him there. His answer isn't a rejection of Capernaum. It's a statement of what he was actually sent to do: "To the other towns also I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent." Not ought to. Must.

bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090226.cfm →

Leaving the place that wanted him most

Chrysostom, commenting on why Christ moves on from the one town where he had just succeeded completely, doesn't read it as reluctance or restlessness. He reads it as instruction: "He might, by abiding in the same place, have drawn all men over to Himself... giving us an example to go about and seek those who are perishing."

The success itself is what made staying tempting — and exactly what made it wrong. Chrysostom adds a second observation that cuts the other way: "Miracles are always thought greater when the worker is gone, since they themselves are then the more heeded." The work at Capernaum wasn't diminished by his leaving. If anything, leaving is what let it stand on its own, rather than depending on him staying to keep proving it.

There's a discipline in this that has nothing to do with ingratitude. Christ doesn't leave because Capernaum failed him. He leaves because the whole shape of his mission was never going to fit inside one town's gratitude, however sincere. "For therefore am I sent" is not a complaint about Capernaum. It's the whole reason any of it — the healing, the exorcisms, the sermon in the synagogue two days before — was happening in the first place.

Paul's line in today's first reading is the same discipline from a completely different angle. Writing to a church tearing itself apart over which preacher to follow, he refuses to let either of the two men who actually did the work take credit for what grew: "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase." Not "I planted better." Not "Apollos watered wrong." Just: the growth was never the planter's to claim. "You are God's field, God's building" — not Paul's, not Apollos's, and Capernaum, for all its healing, was never Christ's to keep either.

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