The Rite of Election at St. Mary's Cathedral

Bishop Julian Porteous signing the Book of the Elect

Peter Wong holding up the Book of the Elect after being signed by Bishop Porteous

The elect Edmund (2nd left), Josie (3rd left) and Holly (2nd right)

Birthday Celebration

Fr. Peter Hung visited CCC at Camperdown for the first time and celebrated the birthdays for the seniors (starting from the right Cecilia Tong, Li Mui, Yannis Chong, May Tam). Fr. Peter is Vietnamese but speaks very good Mandarin.

7TH SUNDAY YEAR (B)

The story in today’s gospel captures our imagination because of the effort that the friends went to in order to get the paralysed man to Jesus.  We can picture it: Jesus inside the house, crowds milling around the doors and the windows, a small group of people trying to lift a stretcher up onto the roof and then removing some of the roof-covering so that they can lower the man.  I wonder why they did this?  What did they expect of Jesus?  Up to this point in the Gospel Jesus had been preaching about the coming kingdom of God and of a new relationship with God.  He had been preaching that God was transforming the world.  People came to him because he offered a message that promised a new situation, a better situation.  He promised a new intervention of God into the world.

Despite this, I am certain that they were not expecting Jesus to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven”.  The scribes were quick to challenge him, arguing that he is blaspheming because he has no authority to forgive sins.  Their point was that only God has authority to forgive sins.  And the crowds knew this too!  Jesus takes up the challenge and makes his point by turning to the man and telling him to pick up his stretcher and walk.  The significance of what happens here can easily be lost on us because we know who Jesus is.  But for those around him he was challenging all of their ideas about what God was like.  For at least some among them, a light must have shone in their minds, and they would have begun to think that if only God can forgive sin then Jesus must be a man of God.  They were astounded by Jesus’ action and his authority, and they praised God.

What is the point of the story?  For those who had eyes to recognise what was happening they might have seen a link between what Jesus had been preaching earlier and what had happened here.  He had been preaching the coming of the kingdom of God and calling on people to repent and believe the good news.  This could all have sounded very abstract and hard to define.  But here, before their eyes, they saw what the kingdom looks like.  In the first place they would have noticed the lengths to which the man and his friends went to meet Jesus.  This surely was what repenting and believing the good news looked like.  Here was a man who had the sort of faith that Jesus had been calling for.  It was only right that Jesus could declare the man’s sins forgiven.  The second thing they would have seen was that something happened to the paralysed man: he picked up his mat and walked away.  This surely was what the kingdom of God looks like.  When they see the man pick up the stretcher and leave the house they see someone who has clearly been transformed and has a new life – we might even say a new lease on life.

But how are we to interpret this incident for ourselves in our time?  I would like to suggest that this incident can be seen as a parable for all of life.  The paralysed man represents everyone.  He calls us to recognise and acknowledge the paralysis of our lives, of our world, of our communities.  The sort of paralysis I am thinking of is probably best called a spiritual paralysis.  It is all that limits us, hinders us, and keeps us from achieving what we are capable of.  It is our failure to reach our potential.  It is all that holds our communities back and keeps them isolated.  It is all that burdens a society and holds it captive so that it is more inclined to bring out the worst rather than the best in people. 

If the gospel helps us to recognise this, it has begun to do its work.  Now we are ready to hear the message of Jesus about the coming kingdom of God.  But we don’t hear it as an abstract message.  It has to take concrete shape in our lives, in the life of our communities and in our world.  It will take shape as these are transformed.  The gospel of the paralysed man reminds us what it will look like.  It is like being given your legs so that you are free to move without the things that would have been holding you back.  You can do what you couldn’t do before.  But more importantly, you can do what you were created to do.  In other words there is a genuine harmony in your life.  If we apply this to our communities and our world we can speak similarly about a proper harmony, so that the community is the place where people flourish.

But the gospel tells us one other very important thing about all of this.  It has to do with the paralysed man seeking out Jesus; it has to do with what Jesus calls repenting and believing.  The sense of harmony and fulfilment is connected to harmony with God.  We will have achieved our potential when we are truly living in the image and likeness of God.  Jesus is the only one who shows us what the image of God looks like in human flesh and blood.  The paralysed man – and the crowd – came to recognise him as divine because he showed he had the power to forgive sins.  The paralysed man shows us that believing in Jesus is the first step to opening ourselves to the kingdom of God and to living more authentically in the image of God.

Fr Gerard Kelly