Christchurch Parish News, April 2018
An Easter reflection on Jesus’ healing of the paralysed man.
Some years ago, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, whilst staying with a few friends in County Donegal, suffered a stroke. His friends’ swift assistance made all the difference and Heaney later went on to write a poem about the critical role they had played in his recovery. The poem’s entitled Miracle and in it Heaney uses the story of Jesus’ healing of the paralysed man (Mark 2:2-12) as an allegory for his own healing (you can read the poem online here).
The story goes that after spending some days in the surrounding region of Galilee, Jesus returns to Capernaum. By now his presence is enough to cause a real stir and such is the number of people gathering to hear him proclaim his message of the kingdom of God that you can’t even get in through the front door to hear him.
It’s not just to hear Jesus talk that people are coming from all quarters but it’s also to see him perform his healings and maybe get healed themselves. Only a few a days earlier, at Simon’s house, the whole of the town had caught wind of what Jesus was doing. On that occasion as the sun was setting, he healed a huge number of people who were suffering from all sorts of diseases. It was unlike anything else. Certainly not the kind of thing you’d expect to see happen in a small, lakeside town like Capernaum.
On this occasion, too, with the house full to overflowing, people want to be healed. Not just that—they want to see their loved ones and friends healed as well. And so into the story comes a group of determined people, four of whom are carrying their paralysed friend on a mat. But they can’t get in through the door for the crowd that’s blocking the way. Not to be deterred, they carry their mate up onto the flat roof and then proceed to rip away the tiles until there’s a big enough hole for them to lower him into the crowded room down below, where Jesus is.
When Jesus sees their faith, he proceeds to declare the man healed and in due course the once paralysed man stands up and leaves the house. But for Heaney this is not the miracle of the story. ‘Not the one who takes up his bed and walks / But the ones who have known him all along / And carry him in’. For Heaney, the miracle is the action of the friends of the paralysed man, carrying him to the house, not giving up when the crowds might have deterred others, going up onto the roof, stripping away the tiles and then lowering their friend into the room. ‘Be mindful of them as they stand and wait / For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool’.
The poem is taken from a collection of Heaney’s poems entitled Human Chain, the title alluding to the interconnectedness and interdependency of our lives. It reminds us, as does the original story, of the importance of friends and our dependency on them. After all, it is on seeing the friends’ faith that Jesus declares the healing of the paralysed man. As such, we should take great encouragement from this. For when our friends are ill and are in need of healing, we can sometimes feel helpless, not knowing what to do. But our driving them to the hospital, accompanying them in the waiting room, sitting with them silently as the latest batch of tests are run and so on, in all of this our faith matters. At that moment, our friends may be feeling far from God. They may be experiencing a deep sense of abandonment or sheer spiritual numbness. But that’s OK, for in that moment we are carrying them to Jesus. We can even visualise doing so in our prayers, loosening the ropes out as we lower our friend gently on to the floor to the feet of Jesus.
Of course, this can all flip on its head. The interconnectedness and interdependency of our lives that Heaney highlights is exactly that: inter. It goes between us both ways. When we ourselves are in need of healing, our friends can carry us, however immobile physically or spiritually we may be, through the crowds to Jesus.
As a poem, Heaney’s Miracle is deeply affecting. In a few words he captures in particular the sheer physical effort required on the part of the friends to lower the paralysed man down through the roof for healing: ‘Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deep locked / In their backs’. Carrying our friends who are in need of healing can be a painful, tiring business, requiring stamina, patience and, as Jesus recognises, above all else, faith.
It’s often observed that one of the core meanings of the word faith is simply that of trust. As such, the identity of the one in whom you are placing your trust, in whom you are having faith, is of paramount importance. The friends of the paralysed man were putting their faith in Jesus. They knew who they had to bring their friend to if he was to be healed.
But who is this Jesus? The story reveals his identity in a couple of ways. The obvious way is how he declares the paralytic to be healed. If we know the story well, we take this for granted. But for the people of Capernaum, and especially the pharisees and religion scholars, what Jesus was doing was scandalous because it was blasphemous. Healing was meant to happen in the Temple in Jerusalem because that’s where the presence of God resided. For them, it was for God to heal this man! Where does Jesus get off, declaring healing and telling the man that his sins were forgiven? He’s acting as if he’s the God of Israel. ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ they mutter. Jesus meets their challenge to his authority head on and declares the man’s healing a second time, only this time by simply telling him to ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’, which the hitherto paralysed man duly does, much to everyone’s amazement.
The less obvious way the story reveals Jesus’s identity is symbolically. In lowering their friend from the roof, the upper level, to the floor, the lower level, the story echoes the foundational double descent that is at the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ. The first descent is the one we celebrate at Christmas with God the Son, the Eternal Word, coming down from heaven to earth, sent by God the Father in love to become a human being, to be with us and to call us to be his friends. The second descent that the story echoes is that of Christ’s descent into hell having been executed on the cross, which we remember not only on Good Friday but every time we say the Apostle’s Creed: ‘He descended into hell’. Unlike, however, the paralysed man who was lowered, Jesus descends into hell of his own volition. He is not passive. Quite the contrary.
Having defeated death, his is a descent of victorious love. Christ is the victor. His death has defeated death. He descends to hell where he proclaims the good news and frees those held in captivity. If you look at the bottom of many icons of the resurrection, as Jesus rises from the dead, he is depicted as bringing with him those previously held captive in hell (oftentimes, it’s Adam and Eve whose wrists he is shown as holding—for just as with the paralytic, Adam and Eve can’t raise themselves, and nor can we). This is commonly referred to as ‘The Harrowing of Hell’.
Interestingly, the very word that Mark uses to describe the paralytic’s friends’s action of letting the ropes down shares a root with our word chasm (and the same verb is used elsewhere in the gospel accounts to describe fishermen lowering their nets into the depths, as if into the void). Jesus has crossed two chasms: that between Creator and creation and secondly that between heaven and hell. The friends of the paralysed man can lower him down to Jesus in faithful confidence because Jesus is the one who has already descended from heaven not only to be with us but also, no matter how dreadful our situation might be, to release us from captivity to sin and the devil.
The symbolism of the story does not end there, of course. Jesus’ resurrection on the third day is echoed in the paralysed man’s rising from his mat; as it was too in Seamus Heaney’s recovery from his stroke; as it is also in our own experiences of healing. These healings are all echoes of both Jesus’ resurrection and pre-echoes of the resurrection of all creation (and thereby its healing) that lies ahead at the end of the age, of which Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits (1 Corinthians 15).
Heaney invites us ‘to be mindful’ of those who carry their friends to be healed. Rightly so. His use of the biblical story of the healing of the paralytic is a wonderful spur to support our own friends both practically and in prayer. But don’t forget that we can do so because of the true identity of the One in whom we put our trust. And just as those who watched the paralytic stand up, may we too glorify the One who heals, who descended in love not only to be with us but also to set us free, and who now is risen. Alleluia!