Redeemed Together: God’s Catharsis and Ours
A Reflection on Unction and Grace
Most Sundays, just after the Eucharist, we offer the Sacrament of Unction—the laying on of hands with consecrated oil and prayers for healing. Though it happens quietly at the side of the church, it has become one of the most sacred and tender moments in our worship. For just a few seconds, the personal and the communal meet: one person steps forward in need, and the whole Body of Christ prays through the touch and words of the Church, mediated through the laying on of hands and prayers of ordained clergy on behalf of the community.
Unction is sometimes called a “small sacrament.” It takes only a moment—far less time than baptism, marriage, or the Eucharist—and yet it carries something enormous for those who receive it. Despite its simplicity—perhaps even because of it—I’ve come to see that it reveals the very heart of redemption.
We too often think of redemption as transactional: sin forgiven, grace received. I do or don’t do something, and therefore I am made whole. But Scripture paints a far deeper picture. When Jesus raised Lazarus (John 11), he didn’t simply fix a problem—he wept for his friend in the grave and poured himself out to the world in the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead. His tears were the overflow of divine love that could not hold itself back.
We see something similar when Saul was struck blind on the Damascus road (Acts 9). God didn’t simply give him new orders—God undid him, re-formed him, and sent him out to heal others where once he had persecuted them. Saul became Paul and gave his whole self—spirit, body, and mind—to the work of forming the earliest Christian communities and spreading the Good News of Jesus.
There are many other examples like these throughout Scripture. They are not moments of reward for good behavior, nor algebraic equations of sin and grace. They are moments of release—God’s own catharsis of love breaking into the world. In these stories, God is not withholding grace; God is revealing and pouring out divine life into creation.
The same thing happens every time we offer unction. When a priest or deacon lays hands on someone, the Church is doing what Jesus told the apostles to do before he ascended: to forgive sins, to heal the sick, and to carry forward the ministry of divine grace. This act is not just about the individual—it is about the whole Church standing together in prayer, as it has from the very beginning. The clergy’s hands are not their own but signs of the community’s faith and of the apostolic stream that flows unbroken from that first group of followers who were told, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21).
And yet even that isn’t the full story. When the oil touches the skin and the prayers are whispered, what’s happening is not that God rewards us for humility or for stepping forward in faith. God isn’t waiting for us to “get it right.” Rather, God is doing what God has always done—releasing divine love again and again into the world through the Church. The sacrament is not a prize; it is a participation. It is the place where heaven breathes into earth.
In this sacred act, we are not met with transactional grace but with abiding divine presence. In the midst of our suffering, God shows up and bears witness. God intervenes with God’s very self to bring comfort, relief, and healing.
I have seen people come for healing prayers after long months of quiet suffering—grief, anxiety, illness, the weary fatigue of caregiving. Sometimes they cannot find words, and that’s all right. The oil says what they cannot. Burdens fall away. Shoulders ease. Hope takes shape again. In those moments, I often feel that I am standing in the overflow of God’s catharsis—the place where divine tenderness is poured out through human touch.
This is why the Church matters. The healing prayer, the anointing, the shared silence—these are not private moments. They are communal acts of redemption. The Church becomes the vessel through which God’s catharsis flows. When we bear one another’s burdens, when we pray for the sick, when we forgive, when we are forgiven, we share in the same redeeming movement of God’s heart.
And so, when the final hymn is sung and the candles burn low, I often look out and see faces softened by peace—perhaps still carrying pain, but somehow lighter. The work of redemption continues in that silence.
Maybe redemption is God’s catharsis meeting ours—a shared exhale between Creator and creation. The oil, the bread, the song, the prayer—all of it part of the same sacred rhythm: God breathing love into our wounds, and we breathing gratitude back into God. And so, each Sunday, as foreheads are anointed and prayers whispered, we glimpse heaven’s own sigh—a community being redeemed, together.
Pax et Bonum!
Fr. Ben +
