Ordinary Time
Catholics mark their seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter. Unlike the secular seasons (Spring, etc),
these liturgical seasons don’t fill the whole year; a few weeks of Winter and
much of Summer and Fall are left out. In
the Catholic reckoning, these are weeks of “ordinary time.”
This week was the first week of ordinary
time in this, my extra special year. And
all my ordinariness showed up for the occasion:
I was grumpy and impatient as I helped my mother with computer work, frazzled
by the birthdays of two friends—thank god I kept a grip until we reached the
restaurant, because the celebration was delightful. My sweetheart got sick just before an
anniversary, and damned if I didn’t do a good impersonation of a pout. And there was some mammon-stuff that needed
doing, and Christmas gifts that had to be exchanged or live forever in our
drawers in the wrong size.
All the loveliness of my spiritual
questing seemed to just evaporate, and all the errands I was running seemed to
mock my any sense of journey. Day after
day in the car, in traffic, and in lines at stores—I felt very very ordinary,
and unredeemably stuck.
And then I hit this gospel reading out
of Mark. Jesus comes to town, and word
gets out, and soon he draws a crowd. All
the doors are jammed and no one else is getting in when four friends bring a
paralytic man up to the scene. Undaunted
by the inconvenience, these guys hoist themselves and their friend up to the
roof, cut their way inside, and drop the pallet with the paralyzed man
down.
Jesus seems to be impressed. Marks’s gospel says the “Jesus saw their
faith, [and] said to the paralytic, ‘My son, your sins are forgiven.’”
When I read this story Friday morning, I
was struck by all the ordinariness of it.
I realize that hacking through houses is not an everyday occurrence—but
it’s not in the same league as angels trumpeting to shepherds. I imagine dust and sweat and plaster
falling. There doesn’t seem to be
ascension here—those guys hauled their friend upstairs and dropped him
down. There isn’t even the easy crossing
paths with Jesus, by which a lot of folks are healed. There’s a crowd, real enough to block the
door. There’s even a small hint that
Jesus was trying to go incognito, until the crowd showed up. And the ceiling above him gave way.
Thinking about these ordinary challenges
sets me up to read the rest in a new light.
Mark says Jesus saw their faith.
He doesn’t focus on the paralytic right at first—he notices what these
men share. I think about their faith in
one another—whose idea was it anyone, to bring this paralysis to Jesus? Did the paralyzed man ask to be carried—did
the able-bodied friends rush into his house, and offer? Imagine what they allowed themselves to hope
for, what they allowed themselves to risk.
I doubt the owner of the home appreciated his new skylight, and
sometimes Jesus walked away.
I imagine that this man was paralyzed
through accident or illness. I visited
I wonder what his sins were. I suppose he could conspire into active
sinfulness—stealing, murder, and the like.
But I tend to think his sins were sins of anger and despair—taking the
name of God in vain, coveting the health and fortune of his friends. These sins corrode relationships—and yet,
these guys survived them.
When Jesus tells the man his sins have
been forgiven, the scribes interpret this as speech-act: Jesus does what he names. I wonder if it isn’t simply observation. There are four guys on the roof, praying for
their friend. How could they come to
this, except through faith, and love, and deep forgiveness?
The scribes pounce on Jesus, asking,
“Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
Jesus answers with another question—whether it is easier to heal than to
forgive. And then he heals the man, to
demonstrate “that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.”
So what is there to make of this, in
this, our ordinary time? Is it easier to
heal, or to forgive? Healing has to do
with you—what’s wrong with you, and how we fix it. That feels lots more comfortable than does
forgiveness, which has to do with us—and more uncomfortably, me. There must be offense before there is
forgiveness, and offense lies in the beholder...some sins simply fade away when
viewed with more compassion, more sympathy, more understanding. And those that don’t—those that really stand
there, looking like a crappy thing to do?
They’re hard for me to loose my grip upon. I always want to bargain: promise me you’ll never do this thing again;
promise me your really really sorry;
make it up somehow.
Maybe Jesus recognized that those five
friends had mastered something of forgiveness.
Perhaps their strongest confidence lay with one another—that they would
have a drink and laugh it off, if nothing better than a story came of the
adventure. Perhaps they understood the
chance was worth it, because they knew they could forgive each other if it
failed—the embarrassment, the danger, any injury…the hopes raised high, and
disappointed.
This phrase—“the son of man”—refers to
all of us.* So all of us have this
capacity, to forgive each other’s sins.
And somehow, Jesus suggests, that is a path to healing. How much easier to take the short cut and
focus on what’s wrong with one another—what needs to be fixed. How ordinary—and how tough—to look instead at
what’s gone wrong between us, and begin the healing there.
* Okay, yeah, there’s this gender grammar
issue. I don’t think
Jesus only meant to teach they guys among us—but
geez, even if only
guys got good at this forgiveness thing, we’d
still be way ahead.
[For those who are interested, the passages
are from Mark 2:1-12. New
© 2008
Melissa Capers