Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 437

Looking around at them all, he then said to him,

"Stretch out your hand."

He did so and his hand was restored.

One handy Internet engine finds twenty-five scriptural references to "Stretch out your hand." When God stretches out his hand in the Bible, it's an act of power and mercy, usually in mortal combat with enemies of God's people. Sometimes it is punishment of God's own people who are acting like the ungodly.

There is a twenty-sixth in Matthew 8:

And then a leper approached, did him homage, and said, “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.” [Jesus] stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I will do it. Be made clean.” His leprosy was cleansed immediately.

In today's gospel, it is not God who stretches out his hand, but a man whose right hand was withered. The condition is not rare, even today. I know one man whose hand was "withered" from birth. More often I have seen people whose hands are withered by injury, arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome. In this gospel Jesus uses the withered hand of a disabled man to vanquish his enemies. 

Even in the Old Testament we find the Lord using the powerless to conquer his enemies: Judges 7 tells of Gideon's unlikely victory over enemies. 2 Chronicles 20 describes an almost comical defeat of Jerusalem's enemies. As the defenseless citizens watched, several attacking armies slaughtered each other, leaving their armor, cattle and other pillage to be collected by Jehoshaphat and his people. Stranger things have happened in the history of warfare!

But, of course, Jesus' opponents didn't feel destroyed:

...they became enraged and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.

If "the scribes and Pharisees: did not feel defeated, we the Church know they were. They could not imagine the triumph he would win on Good Friday. They believed his last breath signaled their consummate victory. They would not see the sign on Easter Sunday or hear the Gospel on Pentecost. They could not hear the joyful shout of poor, ordinary disciples of a crucified man. They would not live to see the Good News announced to every creature.

The incident reminds me of a popular saying, "Your hands are God's hands." There is the World War II story of a statue of the Sacred Heart in a destroyed French church. A clever American soldier, finding that the statue's hands were blown off though the rest of the statue was unharmed, hung a sign on it saying: "I need your hands."

Today, as the Church is again taking a battering, the Lord invites common folks like you and me to stretch out your hand to the homeless, the sick, the elderly, the young, the imprisoned and announce to them the Victory he has won for us.