Today’s second reading suggests that discrimination between rich and poor people had even infiltrated the early Church. St. James invokes the Old Testament belief that God’s special care is given to poor people, choosing them to be “rich in faith” and “heirs to the kingdom which he promised to those who love him.” Jesus chose the life of a poor man; he had “nowhere to lay his head” and, in St. Paul’s words, “he became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty.” In His public ministry Jesus’ love embraced everyone, and He bridged the great divide between rich and poor people, not in a material way but through increasing their love and faith. The miracle in today’s Gospel, in which Jesus cures a man who is deaf and speaks with difficulty, can be seen not only as physical healing but also as a spiritual gift that brings the man to a deeper faith. St. Mark gives the incident a symbolic meaning: the man is taken apart from the crowd and receives the ability to hear and to speak of what he has heard and understood, whereas the disciples, though they were privileged to be constantly in the presence of Jesus, so often failed to understand what they had heard.
St. Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant but as a young man, after returning from war, he made a pilgrimage to Rome. There his heart was moved by the sight of the beggars. He exchanged clothes with one of their number and, discovering for himself the reality of poverty, he resolved to commit his life to prayer and to serve all who were poor. St. Francis was known as “Il Poverello”, the poor man. He embraced poverty in imitation of Christ and by his way of life increased love and faith, healing, the gap between rich and poor. It is by imitating Christ, as Francis did, that we too can bridge whatever divides us from each other.