Jesus, the diamond geezer

 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.