A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s
gospel (Mark 2:1-12) sees Jesus perform one of His iconic miracles, healing a
paralysed man who has been lowered through the roof of the house where He is
sitting. Among the crowd are found scribes that question whether it is
blasphemy for Him to forgive this man's sins. The miraculous healing that Jesus
performs is a direct answer to their scrutiny. Some passages of the gospel are
like nuggets of precious metal that appear single and unitary in nature. Other
passages are more like precious jewels for when we cast the eyes of faith upon
them, many details seem to give forth their light. Today's gospel is of the latter kind.
First, we
can note the marvellous detail that the house Jesus performs this miracle in is
His home in Capernaum. Perhaps this was only for a time since, as we hear later
on, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay down His head. We think of COLW’s
devotion to the Holy House of Nazareth, but this makes one wonder whether there
might ever have been a devotion to a Holy House of Capernaum. We are now so
used to the spectacular notion that Jesus makes His home in us that the idea He
ever made His home other than in Nazareth takes us by surprise.
This scene
is likely the first time in His ministry when we see Jesus also reading the
hearts of His listeners. Again, we are so used to the notion that, as God, He
knows our every innermost thought that is hard to get a sense of how awestruck
they must have been to realise He knew exactly what they were thinking. We find
ourselves struggling at times to understand our own hearts, their motives and
the swirling undercurrents that drive us on blundering through our day, but we
should probably appeal more regularly to the One who knows our hearts best. To
feel that we are known so thoroughly is a happy preparation for our necessary
abandonment to His divine will.
Yet another
beautiful face of this gem of a gospel passage can be seen when we consider
which is the greater miracle here, for there are in fact two: the miracle of
the healing from paralysis and the miracle that the man’s sins are forgiven. For
the third time in this gospel, we note something spectacular that we are far
too accustomed to: the idea that our rebellion need not end in our separation
from God but that He Himself has engaged to rebuild the bridges we have broken.
As Shakespeare says.
Why, all
the souls that were, were forfeit once;
And He
that might the vantage best have took
Found out
the remedy.
And note
something else here also: this double miracle underscores a most important
truth about grace, namely, that charismatic gifts - in this case, the gift of
healing - are not for ourselves, but for others. What makes the paralysed man
holy is not his miraculous cure but the forgiveness of his sins which comes not
from Jesus’ charismatic gift as healer but from Jesus as His redeemer. The
inner reality of holiness is not found in show-stopping supernatural phenomena,
or in those spectacular natural gifts that the saints sometimes display, but
rather in the quiet cleansing and inner reform that comes from sanctifying
grace.
Let us dwell
finally on yet another dimension of this diamond of a gospel passage; speaking
personally, it was the one that most attracted my eye when I first became aware
of it as a child. To enter this crowded house, the men who brought the
paralysed man to Jesus did no less than climb on the roof, take it apart, and
lower the poor fellow into the crowd below. The gospel tells us that Jesus saw
their faith, but we can also wonder at what it is that this faith enticed them
to do. For what strikes me about their action is that they went in the opposite
direction to the mass of human beings pressing around the house like a swarm of
wasps eager to gain access. We who are carried along by the busyness of our
lives, by the frenetic rhythms of our self-importance, and who swallow too
often our own excuses for distraction and inattention, could perhaps take a
leaf out of the book of these men who neglect the rush, leave the crowd behind,
dispense with the conventional necessity of entering a house through its front
door, or even the unconventional necessity of hopping through a window, and who
find instead the almost unique solution of arriving in the centre of attention
by first passing via the heights of heaven. Is there any better example in the
gospel of suppliants of Jesus who abandon all human resorts only to alight on a
path that they would not have normally taken, the path that leads them straight
to the feet of the Holy One?
Away then
with our pious pretence of finding God among the pots and pans in a desperate blur
of activism, like an addict shooting religious enthusiasm into his veins. We
cannot find God among the pots and pans unless our hearts ascend quietly and serenely
above the rush of the crowd and become attentive to the one thing necessary;
unless we are ready to buck the trend of frenzy, not to abandon duty but to
approach it from a different angle. Love’s labours are indeed lost unless our
hearts, divided by every claim on our attention, have ceased to put themselves
in God’s place and surrendered gently to the Divine Labourer within.
