The parlaytic of Capernum and his friends

​We hear this gospel alot!  …  IF it seems familiar, its because we hear John’s version of this Gospel every Lenten Sunday of St Gregory of Palamas.     Even the admonition of Prophecy over Tongues is repeated on two Sundays in different forms. So again I will resort to prophesy, to what it seems Paul means when he says prophesy, which is interpreting the will of God through the scriptures for here and now….  To edify one another and build us up….

7 Again and again we hear in the Gospel the story of men or women who were healed of their illnesses, and it seems so simple in the Gospel: there is a need, and God meets it. Why is it then - we ask ourselves - that it does not happen to each of us? Each of us is in need of physical healing and of the healing of our soul. And yet, only a few are healed …. why?

 There are many theories of why certain people in the Gospels stories are healed, maybe only those that had enough faith, maybe God chose certain ones as examples, but I would like to propose two reasons we need to consider today, in this moment.   One is our readiness and the other is our willingness to help the other.

Perhaps some are truly ready for healing and others are not yet.  Whether by God's appointed grace of our story and or our stubborn intransigence.   We are called to be new men as Paul says, to become what we are meant to be, but we live in death.  It seems that Christ ties this healing to spiritual and physical, as he says “Your sins are forgiven” before the “rise take your pallet and walk”. 

As Met Anthony Bloom says, “ Illness and death are not only conditioned by exterior reasons; there are within us resentments, bitterness, hatred, greed — so many other things which kill the quickness of the spirit and prevent us from living now, already now, in eternal life — that eternal life which is just ‘Life’ in the true sense of the word, life in its fullness.”..... “We must be prepared to become that new man through the death of the past in order to start anew like Lazarus who was called out of the grave, not to go back simply to what had been his life before, but having experienced something which is beyond utterance, to re-enter life on new terms. That is true healing and wholeness”   If we are asking for healing to go back to our living death, why would a thing of humility be taken from us.   When we see the true healing as spiritual, it seems like we finally see that whether the physical happens is so much lesser, maybe even irrelevant.   In weakness is God’s power made strong as Paul says….   All men will die, and death doesn't have that power, the sting, it once did, instead it is that doorway to life.  So, outside of my vanity, I ask God to give me the strength to testify to him and complete the race before me.    Are we truly ready for the full life and the hard call that is entailed in wholeness, the holiness of healing…  

The other point I want us to consider, is that this man’s journey to healing is not in isolation.  Instead it rests on the commitment of 4 friends to bring it about. To tear apart that roof.    We are surrounded by paralysis, both those physically in need but those so broken and wounded that it cries out to us.    People looking for that compassion, for that healing presence, that comfort and support that we all secretly desire and secretly need.  If God wont send you and I, then who???   We are our brothers' keepers,  the people you are surrounded by today, do you know their hearts, the agony, the hopes, the despair?  The contempt they feel from others and that they feel for  themselves that is paralyzing them. Are you prepared to combat that, to tear down the barriers like these four men, to carry them when no one else will, everyone else has given up.  Remember, It is God who does the healing, not us, but we have to bear them.  This man is brought to this moment through the love of others, and born to this moment he man makes the choice to be healed, it is a synergistic through grace.      Who bears them in prayer and in their hearts but you?   In a world full of mutual wounding, who will accept the wounding and instead visit healing in turn, and finally break the cycle of violence.  That so much of us live in, and we were born in.  

Thats my favorite thing about the gospel stories of healing.  I dont think its that the person was randomly chosen as the means of a sign.   We see a God that seems to step into a person's story, a rich backstory that he seems to know and he speaks a specific word to their situation.   Because the healing is always spiritual first.   Drowning in that storm of my life with only my sins as companions, that cast me into the deep, but do Thou deliver me… (my favorite Parakelsis canon verse), God comes as a sudden surgical lighthouse and haven.   Maybe we can have that instead of showing off.