Christian Art | Jesus Heals The Paralytic Man
Mark 2: 1-12 (cf. Luke 5: 18-26 & Matthew 9: 2-8) 7th Sunday Year B and Week 1 Ordinary Time, Friday (Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
1 AND again he entered into Capernaum, after some days; and it was noised that he was in the house.
2 And straightway many were gathered together, insomuch that there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door: and he preached the word unto them.
3 And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of four.
4 And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay.
5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.
6 But there were certain of the scribes sitting there, and reasoning in their hearts,
7 Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?
8 And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts?
9 Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?
10 But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,)
11 I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.
12 And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before them all; insomuch that they were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, We never saw it on this fashion.
The words of Jesus to the paralytic man on his bed might have seemed strange and even, at first, insensitive: the paralytic has been brought to Jesus seeking to be healed, and Jesus says to him: ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.’ This could hardly be what the paralysed man might have been expecting.
Jesus at this point takes a little bit more control over the message he wishes the people, his creation, to receive and to take on board and to understand about him.
The fame of Jesus has spread through the land. He has returned to Capernaum and as soon as he does so the news spreads, the gossip and rumour mill churns, and people once again clamour for his attention. We might even think in this respect of modern day celebrity, in the sense that: the star is in town.
Jesus uses this moment not initially to heal but to preach. It is a beautiful thought that it may be that this is what the people were thronging to hear. Perhaps they did not even know why they were there to see and to hear our Lord. But they longed to be near him. The people of Biblical times, while in a sense lost and confused, nevertheless retained in their souls, in their heart of hearts, the ardent desire to be close to the true God.
Throughout the Bible, we hear of the longing of the people of God for the Messiah. Now here he is: present, visible, and moreover as a human, as one of us. Now we understand these people’s hunger to be near and to be with Christ. They’re just like us. Their hunger is our own. We are as they are.
Faith and healing remain combined, indeed inextricably linked, as is in accord with the Jewish teaching of Biblical times. Jesus teaches the word and Jesus heals: these two core activities of the ministry of our Lord are essentially one. The healing and the preaching of the Word of God are as one.
We witness in this Gospel reading both the resolute determination of those carrying the paralytic man to reach unto the presence of Jesus and the infinite compassion and love of our Lord to admit the sick and the needy into his presence. The paralytic man cannot reach Jesus all by himself, by his own efforts. He can’t get there alone. He needs help. And so it is, as St Jerome describes, that there is a kind of spiritual paralysis into which a person may have sunk that it profits that person to draw on the assistance of our brother man to bring that person as it were to life again, our life in Christ. And here in the Gospel he is: Christ is patiently waiting.
Christ not only sees the sickness of the paralysed man; he sees the faith of those who have brought him. We are thusly instructed of the great value of our fellowship in Christ, of our communion and our seeing God and the image of Christ in our fellow man. We are called to be a community, the lay as the religious. We are called to see God in and through each other.
The response of the scribes is typical of a mode of thought and religious belief which Christ came down to us to overturn. They see blasphemy. We might flinch from imagining that: the thought of Christ blaspheming! ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ they say. Well here he is. We know this, but those scribes could not let themselves do so.
Jesus knows what the scribes are thinking, perhaps mumbling among themselves, and he does something clever. Rather than confront the scribes outright on their own and now obsolete terms, he presents them with a question: what is better, to say our sins are forgiven or to heal? Now the physical healing of the sick and the spiritual healing and redemption of Christ are held together in one breath and as a sign.
Jesus explicitly tells those assembled that this is a sign. In other words, Jesus is telling us that his primary purpose on Earth, his mission as he was sent by the Father, is not to be a medical doctor to the physically sick; it is to heal our souls. The healing of the sick, though miraculous and through the word alone of Christ, is nevertheless only a sign, signifying that which is so very much greater.
The people are all amazed. We are now amazed at this account of Christ’s mercy and love and his sheer ability to help the people of his time toward faith. They proclaim: ‘We never saw it on this fashion.’ We never saw anything like this.
Seeing is believing. Christ gave these miracles to us for all time such that through seeing we too may believe.
We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
Jesus speaks of Judas’ treachery. The evil one has for a time been worming his way into Judas’ soul and Judas has given himself up to evil. Judas has ‘lifted up his heel’ against Jesus. The verse suggests a brutal act of violence, and so it is; this is the violent enmity of a friend; it is a terrible betrayal. The verse recalls Psalm 41/40 [ … ]
In this reading from Against the Heresies, Saint Irenaeus sets out a central conviction of early Christian theology: knowledge of God the Father is possible only through the Son, the Word of God. This is not a matter of intellectual effort or philosophical ascent, but of divine self-disclosure [ … ]
