Richard Bollman, S.J.

HOMILY, 7^th SUNDAY, Year B 2009

Mark 2:1-12: "The Help of our Friends"

Sometimes I work my way into these stories by asking

"Who are these people that show up in Jesus’ life?"

Like here, who are these people carrying the paralytic in Capernaum.

Maybe a son or daughter, a neighbor,

an employee of this tradesman, perhaps, who has had a stroke.

A study companion from the synagogue. His wife.

They are taking him where he cannot go himself.

It’s natural, it’s a work of love, carrying one another.

You know about this moment, how it calls out to you.

And then I begin to see my own involvement, needing people.

Because often our spiritual state, our physical state, makes it hard

to go it alone as a believer.

I need people to talk to about the stuff that comes up

that can shake confidence: especially my confidence in myself.

I get stuck in judgments and resentments,

I get stuck in blaming myself for the past.

It’s something of that–paralysis– we need help with.

Often it is not easy work, not easy friendship.

Have you ever befriended someone who is hard to support:

maybe they hate their job and carry that chip on their shoulders,

or maybe it’s someone who just always has to be right

and they don’t know what a burden this is,

so to get close to them at all you have to dodge their arguments,

like the flailing arms of a possessed person, but you stay with it.

Young people sometimes do this for friends at school

who experiment pretty badly with alcohol or drugs or

relationship after relationship:

if such a person is lucky, she might have four friends, or two or three,

who realize there is a better way to go, a better place in life.

You don’t want to just abandon such a person–that’s it.

There’s someone you love here.

And you want to take them to a new place,

a place they can’t get to by themselves.

But remember, we’re not around to cure one another.

When you carry someone, when you’re there to support,

it’s best to realize that you are relying on Jesus.

Sometimes we try to cure people ourselves,

with advice and self-help programs and arguing with them

and telling them about the best doctors.

But at the core of this, if you intend to do any good at all,

you are relying on Jesus. That’s the truth of the story here.

I’m glad to know one or two people with whom I can talk

who will not give me advice

but who in that way will take on the role of Jesus: and simply look on me

and let me be, and even in that to accept me fully

without asking me to be somebody else.

And as you let yourself be helped,

if you are gradually willing to let yourself be helped,

you start to experience something of the faith of other people,

their faith in you and their faith in Jesus. Quiet maybe, anonymous,

but full of palpable trust anyway.

And then after all the carrying is done, your friends have to step back.

They have to see what Jesus might do.

You can move the roof tiles and lower the dead weight of your friend

to this first-row place. You do it with your prayer and persistence

over the long haul. And then you have to let go.

And here is why I think this is such a relevant story, such a modern story.

Because it isn’t about the wonder-worker, it’s not about a quick cure.

It is about the faith of the friends, the willingness of the paralytic

to just be there finally in the first row.

Faith, born out of the persistent conviction

that this man, this woman, being carried, that this limited capacity in her

is not the meaning of her life at all.

That’s the act of faith: this limitation, this paralyis, is not the whole meaning.

This is a new vision of community, that Kingdom of God announced.

We are not defined by our paralysis: rather

our paralysis invites someone to claim us as human,

to see in us a person in whom the power of life can be at work.

And what follows is more subtle than any "cure."

For Jesus stuns the expectant crowd, and the man laid low.

"My child, good friend, your sins are forgiven."

Is that what you want to hear? Is that good news?

Think about it. What it’s like to hear that: your sins, gone, done away with.

I visit hospitals often enough. I’ve never even considered

entering the room of friend or member of the parish

with such a sudden shock to privacy, to decorum.

"Hello. Your sins are forgiven, remember."

"Well," you might say, "I wasn’t expecting you

to address this." But Jesus would say,

"This is what you need to hear; don’t back off.

I’m in your life now, and you are not held down by your sins now,

you are forgiven, God forgets everything. Let’s start from that."

And once we start from that: once we allow God to erase blame and regret,

we find a strength in ourselves well beyond relief.

And end to whining, an end to waiting around for things to be different.

Things right now are already different because we’re reclaimed

from the mouth of Jesus: acquited, forgiven, absolved.

That’s it, the continuing persistent fact of life when you start to believe.

You can’t do anything about it except to receive it.

Forgiveness is like that: you can’t dream it up for yourself,

you can only receive it. You can only let it happen.

And when you receive it,

you know how necessary it is, and how impossible to just invent.

It is a great release from what gets in our way, our stuck places.

Everything we do to grab at life, to crave or hold on to something,

all our resentments and addictions,

it’s all a substitute for the real energy of living that is in us, sheer grace

that springs from the word of forgiveness.

That is the authority of Jesus in the heart of our broken world.

Our broken families, our broken hearts.

"Your sins are forgiven."

If you don’t believe me, look around at the friends

the ones who carry you. "Your sins are forgiven."

Isn’t that what you hear? Don’t you know that to be God’s word right here.

So pick up your bed and walk.