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

4TH SUNDAY ADVENT (B) 18 December 2011

We have now arrived at the fourth Sunday of Advent and are getting closer to the celebration of Christmas.  For the first time in Advent we meet Mary in the readings.  The angel visits her and announces that she is to be the mother of Jesus.  Advent is a time of preparation and hope.  Today the focus shifts more squarely to the birth of Jesus at Christmas.  But we should not forget the bigger picture that we have been seeing over the last three weeks.  Mary is also part of that picture.  She is one of the People of God who lived their lives in expectation that God would visit them and change their lives and their world.  As our eyes are drawn to the birth of Jesus we too must allow him to shine a light on the bigger picture of what God is doing in our world.  Mary will help us do this.

The gospel reading we heard suggests that Mary was troubled by the angel’s visit.  Let’s notice why Mary might have been troubled – and I think she was troubled by several things.  We all quickly recognise that the first thing to trouble her was the news that she was to be the mother of Jesus.  She is astonished at the angle’s greeting because she is a virgin and not yet married.  It doesn’t take much thinking to realise why she would have been troubled.  It wasn’t just because there were so many things unexplained; perhaps more troubling was the prospect of where this would leave her in her family and community.  She was about to find herself in an embarrassing situation, and could well end up being shunned and excluded from the family.  In those days this was a terrible thing to happen to a young woman, because it meant she no longer had any place to live or any means of support.  In her case it may have been even worse, because Joseph might have decided to divorce her.  So, we can understand why she was troubled.

But the angel says something else that troubles her.  He tells her that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of God will overshadow her.  Perhaps we don’t give enough attention to how troubling this news must have been.  We have probably never much thought about what this means.  I’m sure that Mary was a young woman who had grown up in the faith of her people, that she would have followed all the usual religious practices and worshipped God in the same way as everyone else.  She probably had a sense of the dignity of every human being, remembering the words of the Book of Genesis that we are made in the image and likeness of God.  But she had probably never considered that the power of God would come to her in any unique or particular way.  So she had to think about herself and what God was doing in her life.  It wasn’t just that she would be a mother, but that God was calling her to something special.  Not just that – God was giving her all that she would need to live out the plan he had.  She now had to decide to cooperate with God.

There was one other thing in the angel’s greeting that would have troubled her.  And this was about the child, who was to be called the Son of the Most High.  Even she would have recognised that this meant that the child would have a unique relationship with God.  She wouldn’t have fully understood what this was about, but the angel made it clear that the child was going to have an impact far greater than just the local family or village.  Jesus would eventually bring about God’s reign and would be more powerful than any of the kings of the earth.  So, Mary was being drawn into something that was changing the world.  We could say that she received earth-shattering news.

We can understand now why Mary was troubled.  It wasn’t just that Jesus was going to be born.  It probably had more to do with his identity as the Son of God.  It probably also had to do with the dawning realisation that her son was going to change the world.  Mary would have understood all this as bringing to fulfilment what she had heard from the prophets as they were read in the synagogue.  God’s plan was unfolding in her life and in the world.  But God also gives her the freedom to respond to the invitation.  As we know, Mary’s response has become famous: “Let what you have said, be done to me”.

What are we to make of all this?  I think that this scene with Mary invites us to ponder what happened.  But in remembering what happened back then we should also consider what God is still doing in the world.  During Advent we have been hearing about and pondering the promise God made about the future.  Advent invites us to have hope, and to allow the present to be shaped by our hope about the future.  In this way we are a lot like Mary: we are being called to become part of God’s plan as it unfolds in our world.  Like Mary, we may find this troubling.  Maybe it is what is unknown that troubles us; maybe it is the seeming enormity of being involved in God’s plan for the world; or maybe we don’t think of ourselves as so close to God that God would use us to bring about a new world.  But if we think about it, Mary was asked to have a baby.  She could manage that.  The Holy Spirit worked through her to bring about God’s will.  I think we are asked today, as Christmas approaches, to prepare a dwelling place for God in our hearts, and to allow them to be so transformed that we live out of the love that God has poured into our hearts.

Rev Dr Gerard Kelly