Malachi is the prophet whose words have inspired the part of today’s antiphon. Malachi is talking about a time when evil will be judged, but those who honour God will “frolic like well-fed calves”. He writes that “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays” or in some translations “…healing in its wings…”
O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness
and the shadow of death.
Jesus did heal people when he walked the earth. For instance, he healed a woman suffering with excessive bleeding for many years, and some take this to be a direct fulfilment of the prophecy from Malachi. It is said that the corners of a Jewish prayer shawl are called ‘wings’ and that when the woman reached out to touch the tassels at the edge of Jesus’ clothes, she was acting in faith based on the prophecy of Malachi – there would be healing in those ‘wings’ because Jesus was the Christ, the sun of righteousness.
Healing miracles still happen today. We refer to them as miracles because they are relatively rare. We are supposed to pray for each other in faith and in hope. We believe God wants only good for his children. It is right to pray for healing, for miracles, for God to intervene in our lives – and God does.
At the same time, God does not always choose to suspend the laws of physics, the route of medical treatment or the course of decline as we age or fall ill. God has promised that one day, we will all frolic like well-fed calves – or as I sometimes like to say: We will be doing somersaults from sheer joy when we see Christ face to face – but it is not yet all as it one day will be. We live in in-between days. Christ has conquered and we can have a share in his “light (and life) eternal” but some of us will have to enter through the difficult door that is dying a physical death. Unless Christ returns first, we all will. There is a sense in which the victory is won, and we get to live in two concurrent kingdoms – that of this world as it fades away and awaits its full transformation, and that of God’s reign as it comes into this world increasingly, and mainly through people such as you and I, who choose to surrender to the lordship of Christ and be guided by his Spirit.
One day, that reign will be all that is left. Everything else will give way, whether in flames or otherwise – it will be gone. The big promise of God is that a day is coming when all will be healed, not temporary, not partially, but fundamentally and completely: Our relationships will be whole, our hearts will be undivided, our bodies will be very real and very good and very healthy, our minds will have no sorrow or agony, our spirits will sparkle with Christ-worship and there will be no tears, no wars, no illness, nothing to put a single blemish on the picture of a perfectly working new creation and no false notes in the whole great big symphony of praise and aliveness.
Then the Immanuel, God-with-us, who said as he returned to the Father: “I will be with you always” and who lives in us by his Spirit, will return to his people to live among them forever and he himself will be their light. In the city that will come down from God, the picture of the perfectly ordered kingdom to come: The city doesn’t need the sun or the moon to shine on it, because God’s glory is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
O Morning Star, come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.