Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

There are three groups of people in the gospel reading today where Jesus heals a paralytic man. First, there are the “many” (Mk 2:2) who gathered at the door of the home where Jesus was preaching. We cannot be sure who these “many’ really were. We may speculate that most of them were devout Jews; some were there for a healing, others out of curiosity, others to see him perform miracles, others to see if this was the messiah who would bring freedom to Israelites from the Romans, and some who were just captivated by the message of Jesus. The secong group are the scribes (Mk2:6). The scribes get a bad wrap in the gospels because together with the Pharisees they are portrayed as the villains of the Jesus story. In fact the Pharisees and the scribes were the most devout Jews and they cared much about the right practice of the Jewish faith. These men were called “men of understanding,” since they interpreted the law for the entire nation of Israel. But the problem with them was that because they interpreters of the Law, they imagined God to be as limited as the laws. They put God in a box and anything outside the box was blasphemy. Their image of God is so limited that they could not put Jesus and God together.

The third group of people are the four men and the paralytic. They are different from the two former groups in that they don’t stand around like the “many.” Neither do they put limits on God. They are what today’s corporate sector would call the “proactive people.” They see a problem. They look for creative ways to solve a problem. And they don’t stop till they have achieved their goals. The surprising thing is that these people get more than they ever asked for. Because illness was considered a punishment from God, Jesus forgives his sins and he is restored to complete health.

Just for a moment let me divert to the first reading from Isaiah:
Remember not the events of the past,
The things of long ago consider not;
See I am doing something new!
It is I who wipe out your crimes.
It is I, I who wipe out for my own sake your offences;
Your sins I remember no more (Is 43:18-19).

Of all the people at that home with Jesus, there were only five people for whom what is promised in today’s first reading comes true. And these people are not the sceptics; they are not the ones who wait around for God to get to them; they are the “go getters,” the ones who are proactive in living out their faith.

There are three questions we can ask ourselves.
1) What is our image of God? A little girl came to me two Sundays back, sat in the second last pew and said how afraid she was of God. She said, I am afraid that if I do anything wrong, that God will punish me and send me to hell. And I said to myself, “How pathetic!” So many of us grow with very negative image of God. What hampered the scribes from being open to Jesus and his message was their image of God. Let not our image of God hamper our relationship with God. Let our image of God stop us from being open to the unconditional love of God.

2) Why does Jesus forgive sins before he heals the paralytic? Jesus forgives the paralytic person’s sin before he healed. Once again, the Old Testament connection between sin and illness comes out here. This thought may look rather primitive. However, the Old Testament connection between sin and illness is not all wrong. The fact is that we cannot have serious sin in our lives and be happy at the same time. Sin brings about guilt, guilt causes stress and stress leads to illness. Medical science proves what scripture has been telling us for thousands of years. Are we trying to accommodate serious sin and well-being in our lives? Today’s reading tells us that that is an impossibility.

3) Which of the three groups would we put ourselves into? If we should evaluate our relationship with God; if we should evaluate our faith today, which of the groups do we fit in? Moreover, are we missing out on God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, God’s healing because we are not proactive in our faith? Let us ask the Holy Spirit to give the kind of faith that the four men and the paralytic had.

We are at Jesus’ home. At this Eucharist let us bring before out God, our need for his love, forgiveness and healing.
Amen.

- Fr. Satish Joseph