Here’s one way to forgiveness: Get four friends (preferably athletic) to carry you on a stretcher. You may not know it but the burden of your sins probably paralyzes you or prevents you from moving about freely. You might as well lie on that stretcher and get your friends to clamber up the roof of the house where Jesus is. It would help if they were creative and acrobatic because it would take some gymnastics and carpentry to bore a hole in the roof to deliver you up (or down) to Jesus.
This is so like Mission Impossible, 20 centuries before the movie. Or (if you’re the Broadway type) this scene is an adaptation of that immortal line in the Sound of Music, “when God closes the door, he opens a window.” In the end, as we know it, a window (actually a roof) is opened. The package is lowered. You are delivered to Jesus. Mission accomplished.
“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven.’” And not only that, the burden you’ve been carrying all your life is lifted; light streams through the window; you get to move about freely again.
This is all so consoling. I get to be forgiven not because of my own faith and do-goodery, and not only out of my contrition and penance and repeated resolutions to do better. God knows how wanting I am in those. I get to be reconciled because of those who are reconciled with me, because of those I’ve “friended” who carry me. I get to be forgiven because of their faith and resourcefulness and even their acrobatics.
I guess this is what church means. When it comes to redemption and grace, and all the things that matter, you don’t do these, you can’t go these things alone. You can pretend to have the means to boot yourself up, self-made man or woman that you suppose you are. But in the end, as it has always been from the very beginning, you live only insofar as the arms that carry you are strong and willing.
As church begins, it grows from that collective confession of paralysis (or futility) into a shared realization that ultimately we live on the goodness and benefaction of others. It is this gathering of saints and sinners, the church the people of God, who helps us receive the grace and presence of the Lord amid our crowded lives. Church eventually happens when we apply our hands to the stretcher and carry each other closer to Christ.
When the meaning of church eludes us or when church is challenged to mean more than the surface rituals and gatherings we’ve been accustomed to, it is good to go back to this story of the four friends and a paralytic. The story is iconic of the church through whose faith, hope, and love we are brought to reconciliation. If church were to mean more, it would be in communion, in the strength and depth and imagination of that communion.
But the story of the four friends and the paralytic is more than just about church mediating that communion with the Lord. The scene is all so Filipino as well; and not only because it is soaked in the spirit of malasakit and bayanihan. Filipinos can resonate with the story because of the resourcefulness there, the kind of adaptive capacity and resilience that you find often in desperate conditions of poverty and defeat. Like ants that go around obstacles, we seem to carry a homing device that enables us to find a way out (or in this case, a way in or a way home) by instinct. Kahit anupaman, hahanapan ng paraan makauwi sa tahanan.
There is boldness as well, even defiance in the breaking of barriers in this story. During these days of the impeachment trial, we are posed with all sorts of barriers to the truth of the matter at hand. But we do well to be cautious not to bring the whole house down and wreak harm upon ourselves. If we are Filipino enough to bear each other’s burdens in the spirit of malasakit and bayanihan, we will be resourceful in finding a way to the truth that sets us free.
In the first reading today, the prophet speaks to a people in captivity. With power in his words, he tells them to forget the past, “the things of long ago consider not.” He tells them it is God who is “doing something new,” God who is making a way in the desert, forming rivers in the wasteland.
The prophet is speaking to us as well, promising the newness of a way out of our captivity. Let us allow God to make this impossible mission possible. Let us make way for this newness to happen. We can do this because in the Philippines, as it was in that Capernaum house, when God or whoever closes the door, we don’t go for the window. We open a roof.
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Fr. Jose Ramon T Villarin SJ is President of the Ateneo de Manila University. For feedback on this column, e-mail tinigloyola@yahoo.com